On the surface, Meredith Hamlin and John Powlaski couldn’t be more different from one another. Meredith is a self-described “uber-progressive,” a Prius-driving vegan who canvassed for Bernie Sanders, and John is a MAGA-hat-wearing hardcore conservative who goes to church every Sunday and hunts deer. It seems like individuals with such massive political differences between them almost live in two completely separate worlds, so it shouldn’t be a big surprise that these two have nothing to do with one another whatsoever. They don’t even have any idea who the other is. Where the hell were we going with this?
Well, shit. Here we are now.
Yep, she’s the Rachel Maddow to his Rush Limbaugh, and they’ve never met and probably never will. They don’t even live in the same state. Two different people separated from one another by ideology as well as significant physical distance. There’s really no angle for us here at all. We’re not sure why we brought this up.
In this day and age of increasingly polarized politics, you’d have to be crazy to think that a 22-year-old women’s studies major from Madison, WI who works at a vegetarian restaurant and has a tattoo of Che Guevara would have anything to do with a 61-year-old rancher from Montana. So why the hell did we pick them to write this article about? We should have known better. They don’t like the same things, they have completely different values, and they’ve never interacted in any way.
We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel to find some sort of point here.
Well, it’s time to try to salvage this and wring some sort of message out of it. It’s stories like these that remind us that there are people. And that those people sometimes never meet. Sometimes, it’s good to be reminded that, in this fraught political climate, not everyone knows each other. At the end of the day, sometimes all it takes to think about two different people is to know about them, and sometimes the people you know about don’t know about each other, and it’s possible they would hate each other if they did know about each other. And a lesson like that transcends labels like “Democrat” or “Republican.”
Beautiful? Hopefully. Sorry about this. We should have given this more thought.
