It’s kind of amazing what happens when we go into conversations focused on how we’re going to listen rather than what we’re going to say.  I learned a lot.  Our political system is kinda broken and the greatest casualties are the many of us who are somewhere in the middle, politicians included.  There is more to a story than the black and white lines of Yay or Nay votes.  You can disagree on how to best fix a problem and still both care very deeply for the people affected by it.  It’s easy to throw a political identity out with that dirty bathwater but it’s a lot harder to do the same with a very real person with whom you’ve sat across a table from drinking coffee and eating omelets.