Wow great article! Love how you ended it with a challenge for us to find common ground with fellow Americans!

I feel like one of the steps that's required to find common ground is getting to know each other better (without prejudice) even if we disagree on things. Unfortunately with the coronavirus that's more difficult than ever in 2020. This has made us even more reliant on social media platforms for communication and interaction with other human beings and fellow Americans.

One of the primary problems with our heavy reliance on social media is that those platforms aren't actually designed to foster positive interactions and finding common ground. They're designed with algorithms that take ideas the size of campfires and turn them into raging forest fires.

Current social media isn't providing us with tools to build relationships and find common ground. Current social media provides everyone with a platform and a megaphone (metaphorically speaking) to let everyone yell at the same time and then limits typically limits thoughts and ideas to 280 characters. To express an idea, concept or belief in all it's complexities and nuances within such a small space of characters is difficult for even the more accomplished writers and yet we do it everyday - almost flippantly. With just the click of a submit button your voice can be heard around the world. That is such an amazing power and would seem so beneficial - yet the limitations of the character count force us to rely on preconceived notions and axioms for our discussions.

Thus we inevitably start focusing on screaming our own points through our "megaphones" and completely forget to listen, observe, contemplate and most importantly learn from each other. These things are almost impossible to do given the cacophony of everyone's social media platform vying for attention.

Wonder what would happen if there was a platform out there that fostered debate with a focus on getting to know the people you're discussing something with.