Democrat-Gazette online

I have been thinking about what divides us. It is a subject never far from my mind because of what our country and state and my life have looked like in the past several years.

I ran for office as a Democrat in my deep red rural home district in 2020, naively believing the adage that all politics were local, that party wouldn’t matter here like it did nationally. I learned the hard way that in these times, all politics are national. The experience exposed deep divides with people I loved from my childhood, church, and community.

Next came COVID. We all remember how that divided us, physically and otherwise. During the pandemic was the longest I have ever gone without hugging my parents. I visited them on the porch, several feet away, but never touched them, ever stepped a foot inside their house. I was afraid I might carry an infection that would kill them.

I learned to teach classes online while my kids learned how to take classes that way. People were divided over wearing masks and whether to vaccinate. I saw close friends in the medical field struggle with patients who had trusted them for years with things like cancer, heart disease, and strokes, but wouldn’t heed their advice about COVID. And I saw people die.

After the........

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