A student of mine told me yesterday that she was looking for homes in Germany, where she has relatives, and where she will move if Donald Trump is elected President. A man on Facebook said if Trump is not elected President, he will know the system is rigged by the “establishment” and that the process is unconstitutional. He will join the new resistance he said, and fight if necessary.

A neighbor, a fervent Bernie Sanders supporter, says Sanders should be President no matter how many votes he gets, he is the only candidate speaking the truth. The others are all dishonest and corrupt and he will never support them.

Last week, I watched in amazement while many thousands of people argued that the life of a gorilla in a zoo was more important than the life of a four-year-old human boy, and they argued as well that his mother ought to be jailed because he found a way to get under a zoo enclosure that no one had breached in 30 years.

In New York City, an animal rights activists wrote on her Facebook Page that the New York Carriage Horses would be better off sent to slaughter (and have nails driven through their heads) than hauling light carriages in New York’s Central Park. I write about animals often, and the animal world is riven by extremists, including many people who actually believe it is torture for ponies to give rides to children or draft horses to pull carriages.

For months, I watched presidential candidates say one outrageously stupid and false thing after another, they seemed to be competing over who was the most extreme, not who had any good and doable ideas.  The point was no longer how to find ways to help people and improve their lives, but to persecute, carpet-bomb or reject the neediest people at home or in the world.

Like Donald Trump or not, things come out of his mouth every single day that would have stunned and enraged the nation just a few years ago, and now bring great cheers and applause. Everyone competes to be the most extreme to appease the people who are the most angry.

I believe in the system, but it seems broken to me. I’m not smart enough to know if it can be fixed. But all this anger and fury is helping me to be grounded, to find my place on earth.

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I am a creature of the Middle, Middle Earth I call it. For most of my life, there was a large group of Middle People, they used to dominate the country. Not now. It seems that almost everyone is being drawn to labeling themselves – the “left” or the “right” and seeing the world in narrower – and yes, more extreme – ways. Jefferson and Hamilton always worried about who would check the power of the mob when it turned big and angry, and perhaps this year we will find out.

Sometimes, I think there is nothing out there but one mob or another.

I blame the new technologies of social media and digital communications for much of this, it is possible now to talk all day about your beliefs and never encounter a soul who disagrees with you or challenges you. If fact, disagreement is considered treasonous.

I browsed one Facebook Page after the Cincinnati Zoo tragedy and a woman there posted a statement to the effect that the zoo officials should be prosecuted for murder for killing Harambe the gorilla, they should have let the little boy take his chances in Harambe’s enclosure, since the boy chose to go into his living area, and the mother ought to go to jail as well for not keeping a closer watch on him.

The mother was to blame, the righteous juries decided on Facebook and Twitter, safe sitting on their butts behind their computer screens. Judging others is the coward’s new sport.

Perhaps because I live on a farm in upstate New York and spend most of my day writing and taking photographs, I was shocked by this woman’s statement. I should not have been surprised by now, but I was disappointed to read that not a single one of the scores of people who posted replies disagreed with her or challenged her outrageous, ignorant and irrational position.

There was a time when such hateful and unbalanced thinking would have been widely condemned, people would have been appalled by it, but it was just another crazy page on Facebook, the land of the new Outrage Addicts, and one of many million such pages.

It is frankly hard for me to see such hurtful,  ignorant and irrational positions all over the Internet and on the news every day, even before the presidential campaigns.  Our news has become a public health issue, everyone who is sane tries to avoid it. Nobody really seems to notice the extreme statements any longer, they are just part of the background of our lives.

I dislike extremes. I dislike labels. I do not see my life as an argument with strangers. I am not a slave to the left or right ways of looking at the world, no matter how quick people are to try to label me. I don’t label myself, which is the point.

There are no longer any Walter Cronkite’s out there to challenge us to take a different or alternative look at things, and Cronkite (I knew him a bit from my days at CBS News) was hardly a deep thinker or a radical. He was very much a man of the Middle, and that, I believe, is why he was considered the most trusted man in America.

How is anyone to earn such trust in the age of social media, where we only have to talk to ourselves, and have our own ideas reflected back to us, no matter how dumb or unraveled we are? If you disagree, then you become the hated other, the rigged and brainwashed tool of one establishment or another – and there are plenty to choose from. To disagree is to be dismissed and condemned, like one of the Salem witches.

If you have a different point of view, you are guilty and condemned, it doesn’t matter for what.

I am coming to see my life in the Middle as a faith, a spiritual calling, not a political position. Many of my readers do trust me, and I am so grateful for that, an I often wonder why, since I am resistant to join in the hateful screaming that passes for dialogue in our time.

Those of us who live in the Middle, who try to think and listen, also have to struggle to stand in our truth and keep our footing when so many people are abandoning reason and joining these new kinds of mobs. No one wants to be swept away in the fury if they want to remain independent.

One reader named Irene tried to explain it to me yesterday. “You are unpredictable,” she said, “you seem to actually think about the things you write about before you write about them. Of course, I often disagree with you,” she said, “but because you don’t label yourself, I am more open to considering what it is you say.”

Not exactly rhapsodic praise, but important to me, and meaningful. That is precisely what I try to do, perhaps one reason my blog has so many people reading it. I hope so. That gives me hope.

This kind of message is encouraging and affirming to me.

For most of our history, no one needed to have to say they followed someone even though they disagreed with him or her. That was the idea. What was the point of only reading people you agreed with?

But in our time, more and more people are only reading people they agree with, and the American Mind is shrinking and angry as a result. Facebook can do a lot of things, but it will almost never teach people how to think and compromise or negotiate – the principle tools of a democratic culture.

If you live in the Middle and write in the Middle, you might be a bit lonely sometimes especially this year. The Middle is not the medium for social media, neither is rational thinking, that is the new forum for extreme and unchallenged thinking.

But I have never been prouder of being a citizen of Middle Earth than I am now, it has, to me, become the most moral position there is, and that is surely a new way to look at it. It amazes me that I fell into the right way without quite realizing it.  I think my motto often is “I Don’t Know,” and I do not ever see the world in black-and-white, there are just too many other colors.

I am not moving anywhere whether Trump gets elected or not, this is my home, my country. It has survived worse than him.

But this year is both empowering me and inspiring me to remain in my Middle Earth, I think it is the place for people who really believe in democracy to be. No one who puts a label on me is a friend of mine, and I am loath to listen to anyone who defines themselves in narrow and extreme ways.

That is where I have landed, how I will survive in a world of extremes – by not succumbing to that call. It feels like a good place to be, even in a time of extremes.