A-Z Blog First Posting

I've decided that with all of the animosity between different groups in our country (Republicans vs. Democrats, Conservatives vs. Liberals, Tea Party vs. OFA, etc) it is time to try to find out if we are really as far apart as the noise would make it appear.

Since all of us share the common background of being Americans and probably believe in pretty similar Core Values (Democracy, Freedom, Independence) it doesn't make sense to me that we can all read or hear about something and come away with such different interpretations. I thik some of it is caused by marketing from one side or the other and some of it is caused by us not collectively taking the time to read for ourselves what is going on and then making a decision about how we feel about it.

I'll give you the most current example. It will be the subject of a series of blogs later. Health Care Reform. Now, I have friends, people I like, who I get along with, who have similar backgrounds to me but who have a view of HCR that is 180 degrees from mine. So, I ask myself, if we are all intelligent people and we all read the same information and we all come from similar backgrounds, how do we come up with such different readings of the same bill? I think the answer is that either we all have not read it or we are all interpreting it differently. So, what I want this blog to do is to be a place where people can offer comments either based on facts, opinions or gut feelings so we can all understand each other's perspective to see if there is a common ground that we just have not found yet.

The reason I can this the A-Z Blog is because I am going to try to go through the alphabet of issues that we face to see if this process can help me understand the issues from different perspectives and maybe help someone else do the same. One thing I know - if this country cannot get past the hate and mistrust caused by being split 50-50 on virtually every issue, if we can't find a way to work together to solve these issues in a way that we can support as a majority, then our country is going to start down the slippery slope to become irrelevant to the world. If we are unable to agree on how to run our country then we surely cannot tell the world how to solve the probelms that effect us all.