The United States, right now, may be more divided among party lines than ever before in recent history. There exists a fundamental divide not just between politicians but between citizens as well. Republicans are labeled as racist, stupid, ignorant, and selfish while Democrats are called soft-skinned, mob based, arrogant, and lazy. Insults fly everywhere. Maybe some of those insults are true; for many people, on both sides, they might very well be. However, the problem is that people ignore individuality and instead lump people together into a partisan blob. That simplification of partisan supporters is fundamentally damaging to our two-party system and democracy as a whole, but the question remains, “What should we do?”

My answer lies in what I believe to be the heart of the entire issue: ignorance of the issues and perspective from the other side. To put it simply, to respect or even tolerate somebody, it’s usually best to understand them. For this reason, I’m going to urge something that you may not like—I know I certainly don’t love it:

Listen. Listen and learn about what people who you may disagree with are saying, not just what they believe but why they believe. Look at their reaction to various issues and events and try to understand.

I’m not advocating for people to change their positions. Not at all; rather, people just need to expand what they observe and learn.

If you remain cooped in an echo chamber, it’s easy to lose sight of the people who may disagree with you. So, expand where your information comes from, find a quality source that might disagree with you. Don’t try to claim they don’t exist either, they exist on both sides, in mass. Purely non-partisan news sites are all well and good, and you should be using them for information, but there also exists warrant in exposing yourself to different opinions and rationales. Unbiased news allows you to make an accurately informed opinion, and catch when partisan news sites have stepped out of line, but still, those more partisan (and equally informed) argumentative essays allow you to understand why a controversy exists in the first place.

So, in addition to what you may normally observe or listen to, whether it be Democratic, Republican, liberal, conservative, or whatever other political ideology you’re rocking at the moment, I recommend you include at least one deviant source. Not necessarily always for information, though try to find a site that might provide quality information as well, but rather to observe what information and what interpretations the other side utilizes, which is important to forging understanding. From a podcast to a newsfeed, to a column, it might go a long way.

Now, I figure I should clarify, I’m not saying that you should listen to some of the complete wackjobs on either side. The absolute disgusting and unfounded should well be ignored, and looking at this presidential election those people aren’t especially hard to find. But trying to understand why those that disagree with you think like they do, beyond the base and obvious, and including the perfectly reasonable people on both sides who present opinions you might disagree with is a good idea.

And, in the event that you give a source a go and simply find that they’re just awful or stupid human beings than by all means find another, but that doesn’t mean you should just abandon trying. We live in a divided country right now and unless we start understanding each other, it may well stay that way.