I’m told it is sometimes helpful to project outside yourself, to mess with your own ideological boundaries, to attempt, however exasperatingly and however much it makes you want to hose yourself down with the cool fire of intellectual clarity afterwards, to enter the minds of your enemies, or those with whom you merely disagree, or — perhaps most challenging of all — with those whose mental gyrations you simply cannot fathom in the slightest.
Strong and optimistic? Yes. Only with vision and decision.