The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, The New Yorker … when I take in these sources of information (which I often do), I understand they are left-leaning.

When I listen to Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Joe Rogan, or Matt Walsh (which I sometimes do), I understand their perspectives are right-leaning.

Each side wants to persuade me that they have the intellectual and moral high ground. They want me to support their causes, subscribe to their podcasts, buy their books and merchandise, and “wave the flag” for their various agendas.

I don’t regard one perspective as “the truth” and the other as “lies.” Personally, I strongly believe that I have a great deal to learn from conservative voices and liberal voices. I’ve long maintained that if you see no merit in the arguments of your opponents—you haven’t thought about it long enough. This is true with nearly every divisive issue.

How do I determine what it means to be compassionate, to demonstrate love to others, if I am not seeking to understand how people who disagree with me think? This is why I want to explore a wide range of opinions on politics, on what constitutes art, on what moral truth is, and on how to best participate in the shaping of our shared future.

I am not a Democrat. I most definitely am not a Republican.

In many ways, I am apolitical. Because, quite frankly, the game is thoroughly bad, and the players are predominantly bad.

Immediately, some of you think claiming to be “apolitical” is a copout, a sign of my privilege, a sign that I am not under attack by the system that is supposed to represent me. I get it. Answering that charge is another post entirely (it might be five other posts because it’s complicated).

You see, I honestly don’t believe many politicians (on the right or the left) truly give a damn about my well-being or yours. Yes, they surely want us to believe they do—because they want to be able to count on our support, our vote, so they can remain in power and siphon our money into their coffers.

Their gig, at its root, is NOT about lifting up ordinary people—it’s about greed and power and deception. This is not a new phenomenon.

I am a liberal-minded person. What this means to me is that I want to live in a world where EVERYONE is treated equally under the law, a world where there aren’t specially protected or specially persecuted classes of people. So, I’m going to vote for people who are saying that they believe in such ideas (even if I doubt their authenticity), because the best I can do is hope they’re being straight with me.

I ask myself, how can I learn to love myself, family, friends, neighbors, strangers, and enemies better? How can I show brotherly love to every person I encounter even as I protect myself from those who would harm me? How can I be a unifying voice rather than a divisive voice in the small corner of the world I occupy?

I am not so good a person as to feel this way every minute of every day. More often than I care to admit I just want to drink beer and watch Netflix, as I retreat into a very small, selfish world that is about nothing more complicated than my comfort and sensory gratification.

I am disheartened by how rare it is to see civil discourse in the “public square” of modern social media. As if you or I had all the answers. As if one side were the Good Guys and the other the Bad Guys.

The voice of reason, if it’s anywhere out there crying in the wilderness, can’t be heard over the rancor and the arrogant certitude of people who’ve stopped listening to each other.

No one knows the heart of people they don’t even try to understand.

No one knows what we’re headed toward as a country, or as a world. We never did. We never will.

You and I can, however, actively choose how to regard each other. We can actively choose whether to be agents of reconciliation who are seeking to find common ground and mutually beneficial solutions to problems, or agents of bitter division trying to crush the opposition.

Come, let us reason together.