I am going to confuse you a bit today. How? Well… over the weekend I met my Congressman for the first time.

I haven’t lost any of my well-entrenched cynicism or changed any of my beliefs. But, for the first time in a VERY long time, I felt like I had met somebody who was less about YOU’RE WRONG AND I’M RIGHT and more about common sense approaches to things. And then I started thinking to myself, “He’s just saying what he thinks that you want to hear.” I am still suspicious enough to tell him that I reserve judgment until I see results, knowing full well that the results he says he wants (and that I would support) are impossible.

Then I started wondering exactly what that is so? what is it about the way we both do things and our own expectations that makes things that we all agree make sense from being completely unachievable? why am I not willing to believe the best of a man instead of just assuming that because we “disagree” on some “thing,” that he is automatically dishonest and disingenuous?

Can a Republic continue to survive if all of our politics is predicated on the idea that the “other side” is pure evil?