W.T. Franklin

I am an agnostician.

I try to approach the world without first deciding what I want the answer to be. I strive to strip away ideology, conventional wisdom, and comfortable assumptions and replace them with data, established facts, and a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

I am a world traveler and a lifelong observer of people. I find people — their motivations, contradictions, interactions, and perspectives — endlessly fascinating. I have stood in some of the most magnificent places on Earth and shared conversations with people whose experiences and beliefs were completely different from my own.

Along the way, I have met national leaders from both the Republican and Democratic parties. What I discovered might disappoint the most committed partisans: I usually found more to agree about than to argue about. Away from the cameras, microphones, campaign slogans, and political machinery, people can be considerably more complicated — and reasonable — than the caricatures we create of them.

But titles don't confer wisdom.

I've also shared conversations with more than a few salty old souls whose hands were rough, language occasionally rougher, and opinions more firmly grounded in the realities of life than those of many politicians I've encountered. Wisdom has a funny way of turning up where nobody bothered to put a podium.

Those experiences taught me something important: understanding another person's perspective doesn't require agreeing with it. And intelligence, common sense, and wisdom don't belong exclusively to any political party, university, profession, or social class.