In the current political atmosphere, it is assumed by media and most citizens that everybody on the earth who has a thought must be on one of only two sides, liberal or conservative.

Wendell Berry, the farmer and author I consider to be a brother from another mother, writes that “it doesn’t matter that neither of these labels signifies much in the way of intellectual responsibility or that both are paralyzed in the face of the overpowering issue of our time: the  destruction of land and people, of life itself, by means either economic or military.”

Failure doesn’t matter in this environment. It’s the perpetual arguing that counts. That way, nobody can ever accomplish anything, which is sort of the point.

People who put labels on other people or themselves, are to me, about as thoughtful and exciting as branded cattle.

Once the label goes on or is accepted, it will define a person for the rest of life. I feel trapped in the middle, like one of those horror movies where all the walls are closing in at once.

The two-label system means that roughly half the people in the country can dismiss anything anybody says if he or she ever takes a position that is “conservative” or “liberal.”  And every bad or dull idea is one or the other, and none of them can see the light.

The labels expand all the time – red, blue, left, right, and are mindlessly embraced by the media, since lazy journalists can tag somebody without talking to them or doing any thinking at all.

Berry got it right; these labels represent the absence of thinking or intellectual responsibility for any idea.  No great thinker in world history would ever have permitted him or herself to be tagged in that way.

Would you call Socrates or St. Augustine or Plata a “liberal” or “conservative?”

Writing about President Trump last week, I saw one post that warned others that “he (me) is a leftist. He is not with Trump.”  He was warning his friends to make sure I was ignored.

Just seconds later, someone else called me a “racist and a person of white privilege” for suggesting that rural Americans are suffering as much or more than any other American social group other than Native-Americans.

She was also cautioning others to flee my blog, lest someone read something they didn’t agree with.

The American mind is shrinking before our very eyes; just spend some time on Twitter or Facebook. I hope Trump wins his battle to curb their power, although he would almost surely be the first to regret it (which is why it will never happen.)

Our political dialogue is debased, reduced to a kind of Middle School playground with name-calling and bullying, an increasingly dumb culture of wishful thinking, of absolute “positions,” oversimplified and often false declarations.

Or as Berry once put it, “no thought, no loss, no tragedy, no strenuous effort, no bewilderment, no hard choices.”

When a label goes on, nobody has to think anymore; it is all done for them. To be on the left or the right is to surrender or forego one of the most precious and unique things a human being is given: the power to think for ourselves.

Except when I think of branded cows, I can never figure out why people would do this, or why our society would accept it.

The left and right have produced a vast online archive of utterly forgettable messages I call “airballs,” because there is nothing in them, they have little or no effect, and they are forgotten as instantly as they are written.

How many great quotes from the left or the right do you imagine will show up on the statues and marble walls of the future?

Depending on the issues, I quite often disagree with both of these two ways of thought that have drained almost all vitality out of American politics.

I most often disagree with them when they invoke the power and authority of the government to enforce the moral responsibilities of individual citizens.

I have no idea what label I can be given from that position, neither the left nor the right seems to have taken up the issue, and both are happy to enable and exploit it when it serves their purpose.

Between the two alleged ideologies or philosophies which we call liberal or conservative, people in the middle – people like me – are standing on islands shrinking every day from the rising waters of narrow-mindedness. The water is almost up to my neck.

The middle ground is disappearing and barely exits. If you think in public at all,  you will join the ranks of all the other docile animals; you will be branded. Somewhere up there, Big Brother is peeing with joy.

I keep writing that I don’ t understand this, but Berry, one of my free-thinking heroes,  has given me a way to think about it.

The middle ground, writes Berry in his book Our Only World, “is the ground once occupied by communities and families whose coherence and authority have no been destroyed, with the connivance of both sides, by the economic determinations of the corporate industrialists. The fault of both sides is that, after accepting and abetting the dissolution of the necessary structures of family and community as an acceptance “price of progress,” they turn to the government to fill the vacancy, or they allow the government to be sucked into the vacuum.”

Having gutted rural and industrial America, and much of the middle class (along with Native Americans, who were gutted years ago), the left and the right between them make sure to turn each of these groups against each other.

Poor working people believe that President Trump is the solution, not the problem. How could that happen? In politics, most people eat what they are fed, especially if the menu is someone to envy or hate.

The idea is to persuade us that we have choices and that the real enemies are each, That’s why we don’t get together and turn on them.

Without a left or a right, auto workers, Native-Americans, African-American service workers, underpaid women, and displaced white factory workers might just band together and go after the one percent, who, according to the Federal Reserve, control 35.6 percent of the total wealth of the country.

On paper, Appalachia and inner-city Chicago are the same places.

As it is, they are too busy hating one another to talk much or think much.

By the way, that is also the primary reason that someone like  Donald Trump gets elected.  People are so angry and frustrated they literally can’t see straight.

As long as we embrace a left and a right, we stalemate ourselves and people can no longer act on behalf of their own best interests.

Yet we all do know that something is wrong, even though the two-label system ensures we will not agree on just what it is. So in 2016, the country sought radical “change.” In 2020 we almost certainly will seel radical “normalcy.” By 2024, we will need some radical change again, because nothing will really have changed at all.

If this makes you dizzy, that’s the point. One half gets to hate the other, and call them names. That’s what labels are for. And the old cliche is truer than ever: the rich just get richer and richer. Can they possibly control any more of our wealth than they do now?

The tough part is that we don’t ever get anywhere this way. We just keep taking turns. And we can always blame everyone but ourselves.

Photo: Zinnia in the wildflowers.