I’ve known Dan Rogers for years. I first met him at the town recycling center. He quit because he felt the company he worked for charged townspeople unfairly. He had no qualms about leaving. It was, he said, just wrong, and he wouldn’t participate in it. We lost touch for a while and are getting to know one another again. He is working to remove rotten boards on our farm.

Dan is, in many ways, the biological opposite of me: country, not urban, lean and hard, not soft and often helpless, and knowledge of the interior workings of the world, some of which I was never taught.

Today, we had a meaningful conversation. Our country is distraught; one half refuses to hear or speak with the other. These days, in a time of hatred and distrust, it seemed like a big deal. It was a big deal to me.

Dan and I did something: we talked without hate for one another or the cowardly hurling of insults over the digital frontier.

We sat on my porch while Dan took a work break and had a meaningful and honest conversation about our country. Something that was just that simple seemed to me to be so important. We looked across the vast spaces separating us and dividing others and just talked to each other respectfully and understanding. It’s a joke between us; every time he asks me about some work he is doing, I tell him to talk to Maria; I never know what he is talking about.

He got me and was happy to talk to Maria. They speak the same language; I shake my head. He always breaks out laughing at my lack of mechanical tools or choices.

What was I reminded of today? Fox News, MSNBC, and all the media in the world can’t stop us, block us, or bend our brains if we recognize each other as human beings with so much in common, including the most obvious—we will all be dead soon (sooner if Climate Change gets us). We need to use our time wisely and with empathy for one another. We all know that.

Life is too short for what we do to one another in America today. People are sick of it.

Dan and I often talked when I went to drop off the garbage, and I was impressed with his honesty, warmth, and sense of humor. He had no complaints about working a tractor in a smelly garbage dump; he took it seriously and did it honestly and well. We always talked easily with one another.

We lost track of each other after he quit. Newcomers like me and townspeople like Dan rarely socialize together.

I ran into him again a year or so ago. He was working on a complex project for a friend, and I went to see his work.

We were delighted to run into one another again. Dan spent five years after he quit driving a state plowing truck. Since he had no seniority, he worked late at night, trying to build up a pension.

Now, he works as a contractor, handyman, and SOS repair person for people like me. He will do almost anything but climb up a giant ladder. He works hard, is honest and reasonable, and takes great pride in his work. The composting toilet he built for us is what I call our Little Cathedral. He did an excellent job and is back again to help us repair and replace the rotting wood that threatens our barn, porch, and the front of the house.

Typically, Dan comes on Saturday mornings. During the week, he helps a customer build a new house. He comes when he can and leaves when he has to.

I am pleased to say that during Dan’s visits, we have become friends. I can’t use the word love here because, in my country, men don’t admit to loving one another unless they are gay, which is not a controversial thing up here these days.

If you mind your business, you can do what you like on your property, and no one will bother you. New York City can’t claim that tolerance; neither can Boston.

Midway through Dan’s visit, especially if it’s warm, I come out to him with a mug of fresh cold water. We trust one another completely, and we no longer talk about money. I trust him to be reasonable, and he is, and he trusts me to pay him when he asks. It always costs as much as he said it would be and is always done perfectly and professionally.

When I bring out the water, Dan, a curious and thoughtful person, sits down, and I sit down and talk. We each know the other is different – Dan could only have his own house, he told me, if he built one, which he did. I know without asking that his politics are very different from mine and that he is very different from me.

I learned after 2016 to stop talking politics with strangers and even with friends. It was too wrought. But bit by bit, I have stopped running away from some conversations but towards them. I have learned that most people I know are eager to talk face-to-face and are as confused and sometimes frightened as I am. Most of the men and women I know here want the same things I do: work, enough money to pay my bills, friends, and, when possible, family.

I refuse to call myself a liberal or a conservative, a blue or a red, a progressive or a Trumpist.

Labels like that kill the mind and block discussion or communication. People with labels learn to hate people with different labels; that is how they are manipulated by greedy and selfish politicians on both sides of the spectrum. I don’t listen to only what Fox News or The New York Times says, but what I see, hear, and think.

I could see something was bothering Dan. He looked up at me and said one word: “Biden?” He was upset and confused about what was happening to the country and the Democratic party. As a rural conservative,  he was curious to know what I was thinking, and I was curious to know what he was thinking. I didn’t ask, but I know who supports him for President.

He asked me about Biden, and I said Biden would be stepping away soon, and the country’s mess would continue to boil. I said I believed it would be sorted out one way or another. I said no one knows what is going to happen, and people who claim they do are blowing smoke out of their ass.

I said I do not hate people who disagree with me and that our ability to talk to one another so openly and honestly was a minor miracle and perhaps even the country’s future.

I said I can’t talk to people on social media who are prepared to hate me because I might disagree with them.

It felt great, liberation and release,  to be talking to him. I did feel some love for him at this time (I suspect he would squirm at that.)

I said I didn’t hate Trump or consider him threatening the end of my world as I know it. I said the problem with Trump I could never get past from the beginning was the fact that he lies so often, often and recklessly.

I said everyone knows this is true, and I couldn’t understand how religious people can get over that and look the other way. I was raised by a religious grandmother, a refugee from Europe, and she taught me that lying was a crime against God and that I should never, ever do it or trust anyone who did.

I was sure, I said, that Dan did not teach his children how to lie since he is so honest. He told me he got most of his news from Fox News, which he liked but understood was biased, sometimes cruelly. He asked me where I got my news. I said I didn’t get my ideas entirely from the news media; they were all owned by corporations that knew and cared more about the truth than the truth.

I want to decide about things, not what a cable wizard or blowhard told me to think. Try different things, I said; watch Fox News if you like, but make sure you hear other points of view because almost all of them have a bias or agenda. The liberals taught their followers to hate conservatives and see them as evil; the conservatives did the same thing.

I don’t need him to agree with me or care if he doesn’t.

I said the Republicans were already spending millions of dollars on a national campaign to assault Vice President Harris, and the liberals were insisting that Trump’s re-election would make the end of democracy and life that we know it. They have amassed many millions of dollars to assault Trump.

They even use the exact words about one another – liars, thieves, demons, child molesters, vicious insanity.

He said what he saw on Fox News about Kamala Harris was scaring him. Did I know much about her?

I said I didn’t.  But here we go again.

She muffed a couple of political campaigns but was respected and admired as a State Attorney in San Francisco. She is a liberal, he said? Sure, I am also, but see how you went to the label before anything else. You have a sound mind, man. Think for yourself.

If she gets the chance to run for President, and that looks likely to me, I’ll clear my head of all the bullshit and see what she does and what she says.

I can’t yet get past Trump’s love of lying, but I don’t see him as the devil, either. He has some excellent and vital ideas and understands how to talk to rural people, something the Democrats have forgotten or abandoned. Trump, I said, is no more capable of destroying our democracy than I am of flying to the moon. Let’s see what happens. Everyone is trading in apocalyptic conspiracies.

The billionaires are running amok.

I don’t expect that I will change Dan’s view of the world or that he will change his mind. My intention, I said, was not to persuade him of something—I don’t tell other people what to do—but to talk to him about our country and its politics without anger, fear, or hatred. That’s what friendship is – trust.

I did that, and so did he, and honestly, I thought it was genuinely calming and liberating. When we sit down face to face with an open heart and mind and talk to our neighbors, fellow citizens, and friends—yes, Handy Man and Slow Ploughers—we can see each other as human beings.

Dan and I have become good friends. We have crossed the divide. I don’t believe any politician could destroy our friendship. Dan is a good man. If he likes a candidate, it’s worth my thinking about why.

As he left, he told me he looked forward to coming here because he was hungry for conversations like this. This is where I get my hope. Hiding from each other is infectious, as is talking to one another.

Most people are good at heart and wish their families and friends the best. They want to understand what is happening, just as I do. My mission is not to hide from them or call them names. I hope to understand them as human beings, not as labels, and I hope they get to know me, not as a liberal or other label, but as the very human being I am.

That will be a different challenge, but I’m up for it. That’s how I can help restore our democracy to what it was meant to be.