I was sitting in the Round House Cafe, watching Maria take down my portraits from the wall, and I looked out the window and sat the late afternoon sun striking a flag, steaming in the wind on one of the quiet and pleasant back streets of my town.

The flag has meant different things to me at different times in my life, there were times when it made me uncomfortable, times when it made me proud. I’ve never felt the need to put one on my lawn, my patriotism is usually personal, like my politics.

Watching the flying out their so brightly – gallantly, if you will – on this darkening and very American kind of street,  I felt it.

I got the idea that it was speaking to me, sending me a message, something about the wrenching divisiveness in our country, one half hurling insults and conspiracies at the other, nobody much listening.

The flag made me think of the pain our country is in, and the awful division that sometimes seems to be eating us up. It was lit up in so direct a way, it had to be a signal, I imagined, or a prophesy.

John Locke, one of the founding fathers of democracy, one of the inventors of the idea of liberty, whose writing had a profound impact on the people who created our country, wrote that God gave Liberty to men in common. He gave it, said Locke, for the use of the industrious  and Rational, not to the fancy or the covetousness of the quarrelsome and the contentious.”

Liberty was the big idea for the founders of our country, and I took the message of the flag to be this:

Liberty can bind us, it is really the shared goal of all of us, the left and the right, the rich and the poor, the old and the young. Liberty for all.  This is our common purpose, our connection to one another, neither side wants to be bound to the other, or to anyone else.

Is anyone truly against Liberty?

Almost every serious quarrel or conflict or fear comes from this question – who can best keep us free, can offer us opportunity and Liberty.

We are morally bound to not be quarrelsome and contentious, our duty is to listen to one another, and ask that we be listened to, and then put out ideas in the mixture of free spirits, and take something, and give something up. That is the recipe for liberty, the path to compromise and common ground, the recipe for healing, the thing that binds us.

Empathy is the key that opens the door. When we stand in the shoes of another, and see the world in a different way, we are serving liberty in just the way Locke intended. Sitting in the White House, two powerful men, hating and railing at one another for months all across the country, sat down next to one another and listened, and something changed. It was a small thing, perhaps temporal, perhaps much bigger.They discovered that the other was human, they broke down the wall, and they gave us all a bright moment, however brief.

They listened to one another, and so suddenly seemed able to talk to one another.

So the challenge for me is simple enough. I am called upon to listen and learn. I can’t make others listen to me, but I can make myself listen to them. I think the hardest things are the ones most worth doing. Perhaps listening is infectious, and will spread across the globe like a meme racing across the Internet.

If liberty means anything at all, wrote George Orwell, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

The politician tells everyone what they don’t wish to hear. The patriot tells what he or she believes to be the truth, whether people want to hear it or not.

I think the message of the sun-struck flag on the pretty little American street was for me and others to pull my hands off of my ears and listen to what I don’t want to hear.

The rational and the industrious deserve to be free, the quarrelsome and the contentious are prisoners forever.