I have been listening to good friends exchange e-mails recently on a variety of topics that include Obama versus McCain and the realities or otherwise of global warming. What has struck and dismayed me greatly is that there is no search in all of this for common ground. Instead, each is simply lopping bombs from their side over an unbridgeable fence. I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Fareed Zakaria’s quotation of David Gergen in Newsweek June 16, 2008 in which he says, “With the end of the cold war, we saw a new, destructive kind of partnership and for much of the past decade, we’ve kicked the can down the road on our big problems . . . I have a distinct memory that the World War II generation really put country ahead of party. That is simply not the case with the generation in power now.” As Zakaria says, compromise is hard and we are just not attempting, even among good friends, to work at it- for the sake of the country.