Two groups – one conservative, the other liberal – walked into a Zoom class … A just-completed Osher Lifelong Learning Institute course helped Mainers and Mississippians bridge the Great Political Divide. Share From the start, it was an audacious idea: Take a dozen or so liberals from Maine and a dozen or so conservatives from Mississippi, combine them all into an eight-week Zoom course on politics, core beliefs and everything in between, and see what happens. “My ultimate goal is to challenge folks to think in new ways,” Mike Berkowitz told me in an email back in February. “It’s my modest attempt to work on the us-versus-them orientation that is crippling our citizens, our Congress, and our country.”