Bob Schieffer was on Charlie Rose...

...recently and it reminded me of why I endure Mr. Rose and his show: he has such great guests. (By the way, either I'm softening on Rose or he's getting better as an interviewer.) But here are some great quotes from Mr. Schieffer (all emphasis mine).

On these crazy times in which we live:

...my favorite moment in 2016 was when the speaker at that time, John Boehner, called Ted Cruz Lucifer in the flesh and the devil worshiper society put out a press release and denied it.

On our current polarization, which I have likened to a religious war:

...we are in the midst of a communications technology revolution that is having as profound effect on our culture and the people of our time as the invention of the printing press had on the people of that day. But the difference is, while the printing press improved literacy, it caused the reformation, the counter reformation, it also was followed by 30 years of religious wars and it was literally 30 years, three decades before equilibrium was reached in Europe. We're at the very beginning of this communications revolution, it is having a profound effect on all of our institutions but especially on the way we get our news and also on our politics, and we're right in the middle of it right now.

And one of the causes of our current polarization, the tendency of most of us (myself included, if I'm honest) to consume our news from sources we already agree with:

In those days, which I call the gatekeeper era of journalism, where you had three television stations in every town and everybody had a pretty good newspaper in their town, people generally base their opinions on the data they got from those sources. Now with the echo chamber channels that we have and so many of the social media channels out there, if you get your news from this source over here, you're also getting one set of facts. If you get it from this source over here, you're getting another set of facts. So what has happened is we're now basing our opinions on separate sets of facts. We no longer have common data that we're basing our opinions on. So is it any wonder that the partisan divide grows deeper and wider.

To repeat: We no longer have common data that we're basing our opinions on. In other words, it's not enough to have your own opinions, we now have our own facts, our own realities. How do you bridge that? Are we in for another Thirty Years' War? Seems like it.