Who made
this site?
My name is Thad
Anderson, and I was born and raised in
Raleigh,
North
Carolina. I graduated
from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1999, where I majored in Political Science
(congratulations to the 2005 NCAA champion Tar Heels!). I have
lived in New York City since November of 2000, and I am currently attending
St.
John's
School of Law in Queens. While I cannot
verify this, I believe that I am the only Atlanta Braves
fan living on the 7 train line.
What is an outraged
moderate?
For a word people throw around as much as "moderate," it's
surprisingly hard to find a descriptive definition of the term's
meaning in the American political context. An old high
school textbook of mine, Basic Principles of American
Government, defines a "moderate" as
someone who weighs each issue on its own,
rather than following a strict party line or
ideology.
This is how my parents
taught me to look at politics. At our dinner table,
you couldn't get away with saying you supported some
cause just because some politician said he did, or because the
guys in R.E.M. did a benefit for it. My parents made
sure we always considered the other side of the coin.
I came up with the idea for this website, and the name
"outraged moderates," when I realized that no one was
providing a voice for myself, and a lot of people I
know. These people range from my parents in North
Carolina, to Brooklyn and Queens natives I have come
to know during my four years living in New York. Our
opposition to the Bush administration is not based merely
on party allegiances, or whether we like the President
personally, or even over differences of opinion on how the
government should solve certain problems. It is much deeper
than that.
During the
last five years, many of the Bush administration's
policies have gone against everything I’ve ever learned about
how America
is supposed to work: as a political science major, as an Eagle
Scout, and as a member of a family that has lived in the American
South since before the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution were signed.
Funding
Outragedmoderates.org is
not affiliated with any political campaigns, PACs, or "527"
groups. Total expenditures to date are approximately
$750. To help cover these costs, outragedmoderates.org is
selling t-shirts, bumper stickers, and other items through cafepress.org, and accepting small monetary
donations through Paypal (no donation is too small):
Thanks to my
family
This site is
dedicated to my family, and
especially to my grandparents.
My mother's
father, the late John G. Cooke, Jr., was born in
rural Alabama. During World War II, he was an
officer in the Army Air Corps at Tuskeegee, where he
helped train this country's first black fighter pilots - a
group of pioneers who have only recently been given the respect
they deserve. Serving in the
Air Force Reserve in the '50's, he was recalled to active duty as a
supply officer in Japan during the Korean War. My grandmother,
Irene Cooke, earned a Masters in Library Science, and developed
the first elementary school library in the state of Louisiana.
Later, she worked as a librarian at Centenary College in
Shreveport, where she still lives. As a devoted Methodist, she
has always been active in her church, including volunteering as
church librarian.
During World War
II, my paternal grandfather, the late Harold Eugene Anderson, left the mountains of
North
Carolina to serve in the U.S.
Army. He never made it
home to McDowell County: he was one of the 19,000
Americans who died in the Battle of the Bulge. My
grandmother, Marguerite Stem, served on the home front during the
war, working at aircraft factories in Baltimore and
Hartford. Later she remarried; my
stepgrandfather and namesake, the late Thad Stem,
Jr., wrote books and poems documenting small-town life in the
South, and editorials for the Raleigh News and
Observer. He lived in Oxford, North Carolina his
entire life, and he is a key character in Tim Tyson's
critically-acclaimed "Blood Done Sign My Name." My
grandmother taught in some of North Carolina's first integrated
high school classrooms, has written a historical novel about
Americans living in China, and to this day, works as
a docent at the North Carolina Museum of
Art.
