Everything in Moderation?

A few recent news items have given me cause to navel-gaze about my personal politics. In most things, particularly social legislation, I think of myself as a liberal. I also like to add a hasty, "...but I'm fiscally conservative!", at the end of that claim, but I'm not sure how true that is. The reality is that my personality, or my biological interface with real-time society, tends more towards a moderate stance. I have the curse of being able to see both sides of most issues, combined with the competing angel and devil of empathy and pragmatism on my shoulders.

People from Canada and Europe who post regularly at my favorite social forum, Boardgamegeek, are fond of saying that there are almost no liberals in U.S. politics. I think that they're mostly correct. I also think that the majority of people are actually born moderates, but that they tend to drift right or left based on one or two issues that are very important to them. Buying the whole hog, so to speak, when all they wanted was a BLT.

The tricky part about being (and staying) a moderate is the lure of stability. Our political culture frowns upon the wishy-washy, and rewards the "courage" of convictions. It's a bit of a relief to land on one side or the other, where welcoming hands pull your dinghy to shore and clap you on the back for your wise decision. At a personal level, it can be paralyzing to consider everything from all sides. Cars tend to pile up behind you at the drive-thru window, honking in the sunshine.

Anyhows, here's the news items: this story is about a proposal to convert some land in a government-owned park into housing for the homeless (it's much more nuanced than that). It's not in my neighborhood, but it very well could be. Seattle prides itself on being progressive, and voters have supported initiatives to "end homelessness" in the past, but this is where that progressiveness gets put to the test. I think that any neighborhood is going to fight this due to an increased risk of crime and plummeting property values. However, it's really difficult to imagine any other way of solving this problem short of creating a slum downtown. I would like to see homeless people get more of an opportunity for personal stability, particularly if they have children. I would really want to vote FOR this if it came up in my neighborhood, but I'm not sure if I could actually pull the trigger. I've committed to providing for the future of a family here, and such a vote seems irresponsible in light of that.

The second one is about torturing alleged terrorists. I know that there are domains in which the U.S. government acts outside of all laws, and a small part of me supports this capability, evil as it is (I'm not proud of this, just being honest). I think the reason lies in the thought experiment that's often posed by bad television shows, like "24": what do you do when the clock is ticking on a nuclear device in a metropolitan area, or when someone is holding your loved ones, and you have someone in front of you, tied to a chair, who may or may not have the solution? Applied to national security, it would seem on the surface to be irresponsible and unrealistic to shackle our guard dogs against the insidious and persistent threat of terror attacks. So why not just make it legitimate, and protect the perpetrators of torture from the threat of prosecution and notoriety? I guess because it's a terrible policy and is irredeemably immoral, and that accepting it for the sake of national security is a slippery slope to seeing it applied to more homegrown types of criminal behavior (or seeing the terrorism tag applied to a broader range of offenses).