In a world where the new normal is the extreme, I detest extremes.

I am a Republican who doesn’t watch Fox News. I try to figure out how people on the other side of the aisle think, so I read the New York Times and Washington Post daily.

I don’t understand why black people consistently vote for liberals in overwhelming numbers while they flee the state’s most liberal towns, Chapel Hill and Asheville, the only two North Carolina communities that lost black population the last decade.

It doesn’t make sense that UNC-Chapel Hill professors, who are supposed to prepare our youth to think independently, complain about our state’s political system being rigged by gerrymandering, yet select a social sciences faculty whose party affiliation is 23 to 1 in favor of Democrats.

I don’t understand how Google maintains 1,000 data points on every American, yet our government can’t fully inform gun dealers of people’s criminal records.

Nor do I see the logic in why taking guns away from everyone except criminals will make the world a safer place.

It makes no sense to me why the president is so obsessed with the Russian investigation if nothing happened.

I don’t get how lowering corporate taxes constitutes a war on the middle class when such a large percentage of the shares of corporations are owned by pension funds and individual accounts that fund the retirement of the middle class.

I am totally bewildered how people can say with a straight face that freedom of speech is a valid principle only when they agree with what is being said.

It escapes me why progressives care more about the size of a chicken’s house than the cost of a poor person’s food.

It doesn’t register how CEOs of public companies with shareholders and customers of every political stripe feel their job is a platform to pontificate about their personal agendas.

Admittedly, modern politics is confusing. But why did the Democrats nominate a white woman for president who lost 52% of the white women vote?

It perplexes me why we apply a tax to companies when they hire a human but give a tax deduction to those which purchase robots.

I can’t comprehend why a monetary system where you can lose your entire net worth if you forget your password is the wave of the future.

I don’t understand how an academic institution can consistently admit 60 percent of its students from one gender yet teach that all gender bias harms that same gender.

I still believe men and women are different. How passé!

I’ve been around too long to understand why educated people embrace socialism when it has never worked anywhere…ever.

I don’t care what happens to a statue for a different reason than everyone else cares what does happen to it. I proposed to my first wife next to Silent Sam, and the marriage did not work out.

I still hang on to the old-fashioned notion that academic freedom gives you the right to attack ideas, not people.

And I will never understand why the book that has had the most profound impact on modern history is banished in most classrooms.

Finally, I can’t figure out why our nation enjoys being polarized. I worked for a moderate president, George H.W. Bush, and was recruited to senior positions by both Presidents Obama and Trump.
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Clearly, I am out of touch with modern thinking, so don’t ask why The News & Observer would request that I write a monthly column. I have no idea.