A true American story. A few years ago, sometime in the fall of 2017, I was up in the Chicago area, and circumstances required me to take a very long Uber ride out to some suburb or another. The guy who picked me up was in his late 6Os or early 70s. He was driving a new Mercedes.

The car was more expensive than anything I could affford. The driver & I were together for over an hour. He was very affable and inquisitive, much more interested in hearing about me than talking about himself. But over time I realized I was in the company of a man of substance.

Eventually, curiosity got the better of me. “Pardon me,” I said. “But I gather that from what you say that you have worked in international business. How is it that you came to drive an Uber?” He laughed. He understood that I was asking in my clumsy way if he needed the money.

He explained that he was retired, that money was no problem, but that he drove an Uber to escape from his home. Out of respect for the gentleman, I won’t go into details. Suffice it to say that a terrible tragedy befell one of his children. The tragedy was no one’s fault.

But it had created terrible conflict in the house between him and the adult child who had suffered the tragedy. And it also opened a gulf between the gentleman and his wife. He never dreamed it would be this way. He had scrambled most of his life. Then he got into something good.

Before he retired, he thought he and his wife were going to be traveling the world and enjoying life, not attending to an angry and alcoholic invalid. So now he was spending his retirement instead driving strangers around. Uber allowed him to escape from the house, but also

allowed him to be on call 24/7. I was embarrassed by the frankness of his story, which he told in a matter-of-fact way, with no self-pity. The gentleman, by the way, was a Democrat. Embarrassed by his revelations, I moved the conversation to politics, which I enjoy discussing.

I was taken by his analysis of the country. He told me that he went everywhere. He drove rich and poor, black, white, and Hispanic. He went where the demand took him. He didn’t care. He said that in his opinion, we were actually doing OK. He said, if you listen to the media,

then you believe that we are at each other’s throats, but actually things are OK. I actually believed him—and I still do. But I do worry that informed and levelheaded people like him are not the ones to whom we turn to present to us a picture of ourselves. Instead, we look

to the MSM or to social media, which exaggerates our differences, the things that divide us. How do we get back to a world where sane people explains to us who we are and what we need to do to find the common ground? I’d rather listen to that Uber driver than any of the talking

heads I see on TV.