It has been a while since I have posted anything… I knew I’d be sporadic at times, but hoped to be a little more consistent… However, in this instance it was a combination of factors – I have been traveling a lot, which wasn’t really conducive to doing this; and when I did have time, the events on the news seemed to supersede what I was thinking of writing about – and I wanted to get my head around the events rather than giving some knee jerk reaction.
As I mentioned, I have been on the road quite a bit since I last posted. I think I’ve gotten to sleep in my own bed maybe 10 times in the last 6 weeks. It wasn’t all work, but it kind of takes you out of your routine… The good part was I was able to travel around a lot of areas of the country I don’t normally travel to, and got to meet a lot of very nice and interesting people and got to casually talk about how life is treating them.
When I’m on the road, I like to talk to people, I wouldn’t say I’m naturally outgoing, but I may strike up a conversation or two along the way… and while I won’t bring up politics directly, you can get a sense of how people think about things from the conversations you have, and sometimes, if they want to talk about issues, I am more than happy to listen to them. Why? Because I know that, to some degree, I live in a cocoon – we all do. We have our families, our work, our friends, and that limits your perspective to what is right around you – even if you try, like I do, to read news sources and blogs and posts from all sorts of different perspectives to “try to get the big picture.” But it isn’t the big picture – the big picture is meeting the people who’s lives are so 180 degrees from what you live and listening to what they are going through… what they are looking for from the world.
Can it take you out of your comfort zone? To a degree it does – but I guess it depends on what your comfort zone is? And that, in my opinion is the main problem with the political landscape today… is that everything is so “canned.” Town Hall meetings aren’t a real cross-section of they politician’s district. For the most part, it is the people who can be organized around a single issue to attend by one organization or another that usually represents one extreme or the other on an issue. Most of the people in a politician’s district don’t have the time, or the ability to attend these meetings for any number of reasons. So the politicians get a skewed view of the world… and the further up in politics you go, the more isolated your view becomes; because the more “staged” the events have to be, either for political reasons… or simply for security reasons – you don’t have to look further than the Gabby Giffords shooting a few years back, or the shooting of the Republican members of the Congressional baseball team at their practice a couple of months ago.
But enough of that tangent. During my travels, I was in very corporate “conservative” territory, to very rural conservative territory, to very liberal “progressive” territories, mainly along the east coast. And it was interesting to listen to what the people had to say. I found the people in the rural region the most interesting, and most eye-opening. As I traveled the following things were going on: the President shook up his staff; the North Korea situation was heating up (and seemingly faded from the front pages); the Charlottesville situation erupted; and as the President again shook up his inner circle. So there were quite a lot of topics to have conversations about – and in the next posting, I will share some of my musings on those discussions…
Until then… take care and be safe.
A View from the Purple Seats 