People’s language and emotions get intense around wedge issues like abortion, gun rights, and tax levels. One side says the other wants to control women’s bodies, the other says the one wants to kill babies. Such characterizations, mischaracterizations, and seeing the other from your view not theirs makes finding common ground nearly impossible. I call this pattern the worst problem in the world.

Yet we have to live together. Secession didn’t work so well in 1861. That’s at the national level. At the individual level, if we can’t talk calmly to our neighbors or think calmly, we can’t become calm in the rest of life. Being angry all the time, or being stuck in emotions in that direction, doesn’t make for a fulfilling life.

My growing practice of reading books from people I disagree with and trying to meet them, not just to know what they say but to learn it well enough to feel it, is becoming more relevant. Recall that understanding and feeling doesn’t mean supporting or promoting. On the contrary, it enables communication and calmness.

Handling internally multiple views on deeply conflicting, polarizing issues leads me to think thoughts like the following. Hoping that writing clearly doesn’t prompt people to cancel me, I’ll use the example of abortion for concreteness, but other issues could be substituted.

“Abortion is a matter of life and death. People may feel tempted to take matters into their own hands, but government handles life and death, not just taxes and scheduling holidays. Government decides if young men can be compelled to risk their lives for national defense and if the death penalty is legal.

Okay, so government is appropriate to handle such matters. What should it do?

People disagree on when someone becomes a person that the government is bound to protect. I think everyone agrees that before a human sperm fertilizes a human egg, a human life hasn’t formed, and that once a baby is born, one has. As for when, from conception to birth, the change happens, not only do many people disagree, they disagree on what criteria to use.

Democracy provides for how to handle such conflict. We vote and legislate. We follow agreed-on principles and processes. We remember that no matter how strongly we feel we are right and there is only one right answer, we remember that others feel differently about themselves and their answers. Sometimes a decision goes our way, other times it doesn’t, but we know that in a future time it will again. In the meantime, we accept that we feel wronged. On other issues, others feel wronged. There is no way everyone could agree on everything. We live our lives peacefully with our neighbors.

If we want a different outcome the next time, we engage in legal, democratic processes to influence future outcomes, like education, running for office, and peaceful, legal protest, among others.”

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