Have you ever met or spoken with someone and quickly realized there wasn’t going to be an actual conversation?

That doesn’t happen often for me, because I’m usually able to relate to all kinds of people, regardless of our differing backgrounds, life experiences or political feelings. But nowadays, the last item can create friction right from the start.

The p-word — politics — seems to be where a lot of emails and phone calls can go off the rails. I bet you can see where this particular train is headed.

A reader sent me a letter recently. Actually, it was more like a list of vague complaints about a columnist whose work we publish every now and then and some accusations — unfounded in my opinion — about why we use him on our opinion pages. It was rather insulting on a number of levels.

Ben Shapiro is not a regular within our pages, but someone we use periodically when a regular columnist is on vacation or takes a day off. The column in question appeared last month and the topic was culture and politics and how they are related in today’s world. I thought it was a middle-of-the-road piece for Shapiro.

But there is a saying in the newspaper business that goes like this: Sometimes, it’s the stuff that you least expect will set off a reader that turns out to really set off a reader.

Here’s what the letter stated:

Ben Shapiro, worth $55 million, is a grifter paid a lot of money by deep pockets with specific interests to advance their cause.

Unfortunately, the cause he is paid to advocate is to stoke fear and hatred, and to promulgate misinformation. He knows that he is hired to speak to a core audience, and that that audience is generally uneducated, ill-informed, and bigoted. He can be disingenuous in his arguments, because his fans aren’t going to call him out on it. He can engage in good sounding, but empirically incorrect, talking points, because his primary audience isn’t going to fact check him. He can engage in logical fallacies, because his primary audience isn’t smart enough or educated enough to see why his argument sucks.

As long as he tells his audience who to fear, who to hate, and gives some pithy quips that make him sound like what a dumb person thinks a smart person sounds like, he is successfully fulfilling his role to his financial owner, The Daily Wire.

A newspaper that claims it’s “politically independent ” promoting lies and misleading information on the Op Ed page is hiding behind the conservative liar’s words to express YOUR opinion to the MAGA masses by showcasing the vitriol for money and to try to keep your rag in business.

I called the sender to verify that she indeed sent the letter and to ask a few questions. I wanted to know what, specifically, she felt was incorrect, untrue or bigoted in that column. She couldn’t or wouldn’t cite examples. Also, I wanted to know why she thought that publishing a column by Shapiro — or anyone else — was a tactic we thought might keep “our rag in business.”

Such letters, emails or calls aren’t unusual and they come from folks on both sides of the political spectrum … sometimes in the same day or even in the same hour. Some left-leaning readers, like her, are certain we’re in the tank for President Donald Trump. But some conservatives, including a reader who called as I was writing this column, believe we are unfair to Trump and other Republicans.

I can usually find some common ground with readers and by the end of a conversation, I’m glad we talked, even if we simply agree to disagree. But every so often, the person on the other end is unreachable. This particular conversation went that way.

I couldn’t get any specific complaints from her, and I couldn’t really get a word in at all. It was like being the lone conservative on an MSNBC gabfest or the lone liberal on a similar show on Fox News Channel. But a funny thing happened when I pressed on and continued to try to ask questions. The woman on the other eventually grew weary of talking to someone she couldn’t bully into submission and hung up.

The lesson I took away from the experience was that some folks are so dug in and unwilling to actually talk that you cannot reason with them or have a productive conversation. And that, unfortunately, is where we are in America today. It’s what we have in Washington, in our state capitals and — to some extent — at the local level.

We’ve taken our cues from the cable-TV talking heads on both sides, and we’ve run with them. Civility is now considered weakness and few on either side want to be considered weak, so they will do whatever they can to avoid it.

I don’t consider being willing to hear a differing viewpoint a sign of weakness, but it seems I’m in the minority on that.

Ed Puskas is editor of the Tribune Chronicle and The Vindicator. Reach him at 330-841-1786 or epuskas@tribtoday.com.