“When you come to a fork in the road – take it.”

Sage advice from the late Yankee legend and philosopher of the horsehide and hickory, Yogi Berra.

Here we are, post-election 2020 and before us is the fork in the road. Like most of Berra’s saws, he doesn’t offer much in the way of direction, just a point to ponder on our own.

It seems likely that we will be taking the fork, but the conundrum for 2020 politics is that roughly half of those in the nation will be taking the right fork, and the rest will bear left. This really doesn’t point to the unity many have been hoping for.

Students of American history are well aware that partisan division – deep partisan division – has been around since before the ink was dry on the Constitution. The document itself is an array of compromise positions designed to remedy divisive infighting among the states over the Articles of Confederation.

As a result, the Constitution, while a great document, is anything but perfect. It of course failed to resolve the issue of slavery and many citizens were left without equal representation in government. Look only to the Whiskey Rebellion and Shay’s Rebellion to see how resistance from the poor and downtrodden was handled in the early years of our nation. Washington himself led the Army against farmers in Western Pennsylvania to quell the Whiskey Rebellion.

Washington was a huge landowner, thus his interest in maintaining peace in the west, but as a politician he was easily the least partisan of any of the founders who became president.

There was a rift between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, co-authors (along with Ben Franklin and Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston) of the Declaration of Independence – so much so that second President Adams was in a carriage on his way back to Brainerd, Mass, by the time Jefferson was sworn in as his successor as the third U.S. President. They did not reconcile until very late in life.

The divide between North and South occupied much of American politics over the country’s first eight decades leading up to the Civil War. The vitriol was such that a Northern senator was beaten nearly to death by a Southern congressman on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

After that war the 13th, 14th, 15th and 22nd Amendments to the Constitution went a long way toward putting all Americans on equal legal footing with voting rights and equal protection under the law. Unfortunately, the human side of us has not always lived up to the promise of our founding documents.

It’s been 244 years since the Declaration of Independence was signed, and we remain divided – ready to continue our trek down different forks in the road.

We should stop looking at life and politics as stark contrasts and realize that we all look at things with a blend of views.

The late journalist and author Tony Horwitz took a journey back through the South just as the nation was turning from its first African American president to a new term of leadership.

Horwitz met a woman in Kentucky who was a solid supporter of Donald Trump, however, she expressed admiration for former First Lady Michele Obama, particularly her school lunch policies (albeit she stated that is about all she liked about the Obamas) and the woman also said she had a pro-choice position on abortion rights and, as a small business owner, said she was happy for the business of making a wedding cake for a gay couple.

While this may seem like an odd mix of viewpoints – is it really much different from most – we all take different points of view that differ from political doctrine. We need to realize we all are a mix of independent ideas or we may lose our right to share a path down the middle.