Imagine my surprise when I discovered that not only did Jonathan Haidt shed a lot of light on a subject I've been pondering for over a decade, he also touted one of my very favorite pet peeves, civil discourse. Reading his work gave me hope that it's possible for Americans to figure out how to have intelligent conversations about politics, rather than just slapping 'liberal' or 'conservative' on each other and then offering a brittle smile as we contemplate the many ways those with a different sticker than ours are flawed in their logic.  It's actually a relief to me to gain a degree of understanding about the reasons that people choose to do things that are so illogical and myopic, to my way of thinking.

I breathed a sigh of relief when I finally had an explanation for the vitriolic ranting of a classmate of mine, which seemed so lemming-like to me on the surface.  I've asked people with differing views why they believed the things they did, what led them to draw the conclusions they'd drawn, and perhaps it's a statement regarding my choice of friends that none of them knew me well enough to offer more than an uneasy sideways glance and mumbled comments about the NRA and gun control.  Fast forward to a couple of months ago when I joined Facebook and discovered that so many of my classmates are conservative and I was stumped.  Didn't they grow up in the same area that I did?  Didn't we share the same school-aged experiences?  Haidt's work shed a light that I was badly in need of as I read my classmate's posts with an expression of perplexed bemusement and a sense of the surreal.

It doesn't help that I come from a family where my Dad is outspoken but volatile and my mother is passive/aggressive.  Having political conversations with people like them is the very definition of enamel-eroding frustration!  I long for a time when our society moves away from political correctness toward stronger personal responsibility and, dare I hope, an interest in their government that closely approximates their interest in team sports and/or prime-time TV!  I know, I know, impossible... but if I'm going to dream, I'm going to dream big!