When I first began my admittedly (so far) brief career in journalism, it was in the shadow of a county-level primary election. Back then, I hardly could care about politics, to the point I wrote a column titled "Political atheist."

But of course, one can't avoid the topic of politics in this line of work, and later that same year I felt as though things had become so polarized that anyone hoping to pull someone off the fence would actually end up pushing them onto the other side.