People are not as one-dimensional as the stories about them.

Of course as soon as I say something or write it that sounds like I believe it, and really I'm never entirely sure.

Take empathy, something added to human nature very recently and moving as we speak. Less than 300 years ago, Christians were enjoying watching a bear and dogs fight in a pit, racing Jews like horses, and had a life expectancy of less than 50 years. Today there are vegans who won't kill a fly, and yet wars too.

We are not evolved but evolving.

We have no outside point of view. We are nature too.

The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary all backward — there-is-no-global-warming — rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled.

We don't just change our minds, we change the way we see things. That's one reason I'm a better grandfather than I was a father.