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Being lazy and not wanting to hop out of bed right away this morning, I listened to the news on the radio. One item caught my attention. It was a survey taken about what people thought about interference from foreign nations in our elections. The results were far from startling. If that interference had helped your party, it really wasn’t a bad thing. If the interference hurt your party, it was an awful thing. At that point in the report, I wondered why they had bothered with taking a survey as those results are common sense. The report went on to point out another obvious fact – there is an extreme political divide in our country right now. An aside: I had this happen to me. Someone I had known and considered to be a friend for over 50 years told me that because of my political views he no longer wanted to see me or talk to me. Back to the radio – the report continued to point out ways that a foreign adversary could use this extreme political divide to manipulate elections in this country. Like other things in this radio report, they were so obvious and straightforward they almost didn’t need pointing out.

The solutions are obvious. We need to strengthen cybersecurity, but even more important we need to find ways to heal this political divide. It won’t be easy. Politicians from both parties will do everything they can to strengthen the divide because they see it as helping them stay in power. I can’t reach out to the friend I described earlier because he will neither talk to me or even look at me, but I believe he is an extreme case. We need to listen and understand those we do not agree with. Consider the current immigration debate. This debate is even older than our country as there is always been a debate about who to let into the country. However, this issue rises and falls in importance. The large influx of people from Central America started in the Obama administration and they deported record numbers of people. There is no question there is a problem. The argument is over how to solve that problem. Is the solution to find the means to prevent people from entering our country, or is the solution to find a way to help the Central American countries to prevent the need for people to immigrate? I suspect the bit of both. Instead of yelling at each other, we should be able to talk and come up with solutions encompassing both sides viewpoints it