Mónica Guzmán

And what I'm hearing is,

A lot of people have a lot of judgments when there haven't actually been that many conversations with the people they're judging.

And as a journalist who tries to help people understand each other, that just felt like, hang on, gotta pull back and figure out what's going on here.

I think there's lots of reasons, but the one that comes to mind is we're so divided, we're blinded.

When you look at the research, it shows that when people are asked to look across the divide and guess at the views on that side, we are constantly exaggerating.

And this happens from both sides.

And we're constantly over-vilifying.

We're seeing a lot of malevolence when it isn't quite there.

We're stretching it beyond reality.

And

We really care about getting things right.

We care about facts, we care about truth, but we're not seeing the truth of other people.

And that's because of the depth and complexity and layers of polarization and toxic polarization in our society.

It's the kinds of signals and narratives that we receive

It's the animosity and the high volume of these things.

And it's also, I think, very importantly, how much our relationships across difference have frayed, very naturally and organically, one burned bridge and one burned relationship at a time.

Every time we decide we can't talk about politics, that's one more place of friction between difference that goes away.

But when we don't do it,

We're seeing the world as a projection instead of what it really is.

We're seeing people's perspectives as something they're not.