Join my Raging Moderates.
I am starting a new movement for anyone who is sick of movements.
The idea cemented on Sunday night while watching the American Music Awards. Thanks to the fashion movement, co-host Gigi Hadid was on stage in a shimmery crimson gown with triangular slits up her torso, looking like someone attacked her with a sawed-off geometric ruler. And thanks to the anti-Trump movement, she did a goofy impression of Melania Trump that was neither insightful nor funny.
“I love my husband President Barack Obama and our children, Sasha and Malia,” said Gigi’s Melania, squinting like she was staring into a supernova and ladling on a thick eastern European accent that quickly angered the Make America Great Again movement, the antibullying movement, the anti-racism movement and, quite possibly, the Comedians Against Bad Impressions movement.
These are militant times. Everyone is eager to join a team. Everyone has a strong opinion. Everyone is mad about something.
The other night, my wife Andrea stood in the living room and ranted about the grey jay.
“How can this be Canada’s national bird?” she yelled, flapping her arms like they were wings. “Have you even heard of the grey jay? How could it beat out the Canada goose, loon and snowy owl?” I have no ornithological idea. But this is why Andrea is banned from our new movement.
We will call ourselves The Raging Moderates, a term coined by my editor Ariel Teplitsky. I mention him with the hope he’ll let me expense millions of red hats emblazoned with “Live and Let Live.” That’ll be our motto, hashtag #LALL.
Have you ever fallen asleep watching the evening news? Join us. Have you ever sat mutely at a bistro table as friends got into a vicious debate about politics or religion or the clinical origins of Kanye West’s latest meltdown? #LALL.
Can you see both sides of polarizing issues? We need you. Do you kind of sort of feel that one of the reasons the world seems to be spinning off its axis is that too many groups are squaring off in a royal rumble of competing groupiness that ultimately harms society by reducing individuals to inflexible ghosts in a shout machine powered by a fatalistic sense of fanaticism?
That last sentence could be part of our manifesto. If we had a manifesto. Which we never will because who has time for manifestos when you’re busy reading, spending time with family and friends, learning new recipes, tobogganing, tending to gardens, listening to music, treating strangers with good cheer, caring for the world outside your front door as you would the one inside, laughing, learning, loving, helping, dreaming and feeling?
I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m ripping off the hippie movement. There are real issues and real dangers. We can’t be naive. Our moder- ate voices will need to rise from time to time. But in the aggregate, for all the fear and loathing, for all the movements and counter-movements, what’s sad is how emotionally numb we’ve become inside this cauldron of boiling passions.
I took my daughters to the AGO on Saturday to see the Mystical Landscapes exhibit. What a lovely reprieve to be detached from 21st century movements.
To be in the company of Emily Carr, Paul Gauguin, Claude Monet, Edvard Munch and Georgia O’Keeffe — to stand a few feet from Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night over the Rhone at Arles — is to be reminded that life is fleeting and beauty is elusive and, ultimately, we are all in this together.
But the urge to protest is so strong that people, like a 39-year-old librarian in New York City this weekend, are marching and hoisting placards that read, “Not Usually A Sign Guy But Geez.”
But geez, indeed. Wikipedia’s partial list of social movements is now at 114 and counting. What’s remarkable is how the guiding philosophy between so many diametrically opposed groups is actually the same.
Hunters and vegans, you are now equally grating. What’s the difference between neo-Nazis and radical Islamists? None. Swap out a caliphate for a white homeland, replace infidels with minorities or beards with shaved heads, and it’s the same delusional fever dream of purity and control over others and, most important, institutional blame.
Immigration is not the reason you are underemployed.
Slaughtering people of different religions will not bring you closer to God.
This is why The Raging Moderates need you. Or want you. It’s up to you, really. We won’t be doing any protesting or rallying. We’ll just go about our business. We will quietly live and let live until there is a reduction in harm and let die.
After all, we are the emotionally grounded, the real silent majority.
Sensible fundamentalists, our time is now.