As I mentioned earlier, there wasn’t room in the last blog to fully answer the question I set out to answer then, which was: “How are we going to begin to protect our lives, forests and homes from fires set by terrorism?” I hope to share with you what I believe will be necessary to begin to address the problem.

On my last blog I talked about how polarized our country has gotten. There are the red states and the blue states and never the twain shall meet. This polarization between parties is a serious problem in itself. The politicians from each of the parties are pre-programmed to oppose and refute the ideas that the politicians who represent the opposing party may suggest as a solution to whatever the problem may be.

The reason for that is because of “cognitive dissonance,” which I explain in my recently publicized political book What Would Our Founding Fathers Say?: How Today’s Leaders Have Lost Their Way. As a result of “cognitive dissonance,” the opposing party is viewed as the “enemy,” therefore, cooperation of any sort with that party may be viewed as traitorous.

Assuming for a moment that there are terrorists who are indeed in our country and are responsible for setting some of the fires on our homelands, how are we going to come to a common ground when both members of the two political parties show such animosity toward one another that compromise of any sort will be hard to come by. We must remember that the issues and solutions related to how we can prevent terrorist instigated future fires from occurring on our homeland are much more complex and expensive to rectify compared to what we’ve had to deal with in the past. When you consider the daily “run-of-the-mill” legislation that, up to now, Congress and the president have had a problem enacting because the two political parties refuse to come to a compromise where legislation is passed and made into law, how in the world are they going to be able to deal with more multifaceted and costly solutions?

A major change in attitude for how both the politicians and the American citizens think of themselves and their responsibility towards one another and their country that they are so fortunate to be part of will need to be made if our democracy and republic will be able to stand the rigors placed upon it, here, in the 21^st century.

The reason our Founding Fathers were able to write those marvelous documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was because they were able to put aside their selfish interests and work toward something greater than themselves, which was to protect freedom, democracy and the republic for future generations. The only way those documents could have been written was if they were all on the same page as to what they felt had to be done to accomplish their common goal and if they were willing to compromise to make it happen.

The reason our Founding Fathers had the same ‘mental set’ when they wrote those sacred documents was because when they were appointed as their state representative and became one of the Founding Fathers, they knew that whenever they were going to make a political decision, they not only would represent their state, but also ALL of the American citizenry who then lived in one of the thirteen states that, at the time, represented America.

The question today is whether or not our current politicians and president are willing to have the same ‘mental set’ our Founding Fathers had when they gathered in Philadelphia to write those documents. Before we can motivate ourselves, and the rest of America’s citizenry to be less insular in our thinking, resulting in us being more other centered, our president and politicians that represent our government need to lead the way and begin to put aside their own, or their party interests. And, like our Founding Fathers, develop a common mental set favoring using their political integrity, empathy and compassion, and by compromising, begin to respond to the needs of all Americans.