Goodnight and Goodluck

This is my 100th blog post.

As the countdown to this article approached, I felt a certain trepidation, wondering how I would address this milestone.

I toyed with the idea of a "best of" or a retrospective of sorts, but I settled on a different tack.

I began this blog over 2 1/2 years ago. When I started, my primary motivation was to find an outlet that allowed me to share my ideas in a more thoughtful context than mere Facebook posts.

Facebook was a strong motivation for me. Having the good fortune of knowing a diverse group of people over my lifetime, I was exposed to a plethora of ideals and political views - some I agreed with, others I simply couldn't understand.

I named this blog "Hold The Center" in the belief that most Americans held to centrist political views and that a small, but loud minority on the political right was driving our political discourse to an untenable position that devalued compromise.

Watching this last election cycle, I've come to understand that I was mistaken. The right is not a small minority, in fact they constitute the majority in many states. They are loud and they are effective - evidenced by the defeats of Senators Luger and Hatch in their respective primaries to "Tea Party" challengers. The voters of Indiana and Utah felt that these vaunted Republican lions of the Senate were too moderate for their tastes, while in Maine, Senator Olympia Snowe decided that the atmosphere of divided politics was not worth another 6 years of her life.

I thought, wrongly, that the vast majority of Americans disdained political gridlock, wanting our political representatives to work together to create legislative solutions for this country. In fact, our politicians actually are doing the job of the people they represent -- by not comprising!

Americans no longer value the win-win solution, or more accurately the solutions where no one wins, but everyone gets a portion of what they wanted. This is neither valued nor encouraged -- it is repudiated.

Moderate politicians - once crucial and influential members of the legislative branch, are now reviled. Centrist positions are nowhere to be found. Our politicians are nor longer the political extremists - we are - they simply represent our inflexible ideologies.

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

It's somewhat ironic that I named my blog based on a poem entitled "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats; yet there is a revelation in this passage: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

The best idea I can come up with for my centennial blog is to acknowledge that it no longer serves a purpose. The center cannot hold - in fact, it is pierced and dying.

With that, I am retiring Hold The Center. It will remain up for those intrepid souls that find their way to visit based on their google search terms; but I head to a new frontier - this time on WordPress.com. My re-debut blog will be aptly named "Brain Droppings."

I'll update once The new blog is up and running. Thanks for reading! I may not have influenced readers, but if I gave you something to think about, then it was worth it :)

***  I've established a beachhead for Brain Droppings - I'm still learning the formats/templates that Wordpress has -- if any bloggers have experience with using Wordpress, any advice/tips are greatly appreciated!