In my portion of a New Year’s Eve message from the leadership of the Southern Front Range Alliance, I made the following suggestions to help navigate the presidency that would begin January 20:

• Consume media outlets that have made special efforts to provide balance and objectivity, such as the Associated Press, AllSides, and Tangle.

• Take the Pro-Truth Pledge and encourage others – especially elected officials and other public figures – to do likewise. (For more about this, please see my October post.)

• Consult the website of the Problem Solvers Caucus, which is “a bipartisan group of Members of Congress organized to get to ‘yes’ to help solve some of our country’s most pressing challenges.”

In addition to these sources of information, I highly recommend one periodically consult The Entrenchment Agenda. Start with a March 7 post: “How much damage has been done so far?”

The author of that piece, Amanda Carpenter, is affiliated with the Republican Party. Her career – which includes stints working for Sens. Jim DeMint and Ted Cruz and for the publications The Washington Times, Human Events and Townhall.com – has been an avowedly conservative one. Now, in her work for Protect Democracy, she strives to counter the threat that she perceives the current president poses – a perception that I share.

Robert Reich, late in a career that has been avowedly liberal, also actively confronts the threat we perceive. I close with his celebration of the joyous and unlikely friendship he shared with Alan Simpson, a former avowedly conservative senator from Wyoming, who died on March 14 at the age of 93. Please read (or listen to) Reich’s 2021 essay “Is it possible for Democrats and Republicans in Washington to be close friends?” and/or read the essay that Reich published on Friday, “In loving memory of my very dear 6-foot-7-inch Republican senator friend.” 

Take to heart the example that Carpenter and Reich (and Simpson) set. One’s strong feelings about a given political figure does not necessarily contradict one’s principled political beliefs and leanings. Neither does it foreclose healthy, friendly, loving relationships with people of differing beliefs and leanings. Consider how you too, within and outside of Braver Angels, can form and strengthen positive relationships with people whose political beliefs and leanings differ from your own.