On March 8, I met a reader and sometime critic of this column for lunch.

At his invitation.

“M” is nine years older than I am. He’s a stranger to me, yes, but in no way a complete unknown. He and three of his brothers were tight with my brothers when they were kids.

Like the Whales, M attended Auburn schools and graduated from Auburn High. We both lived in Northeast Auburn — I on 16th Street Northeast, he in the Burndale Homes project on I Street Northeast. Until last Saturday, we’d never met.

Which is understandable. When you’re kids, nine years is a gap as wide as the Grand Canyon. Everything I knew about M, I’d gleaned from my brothers and his email responses. So I didn’t know what to expect.

Quick answer, a different sort of fellow than I’d imagined. If I’d thought there’d be right-wing fire shooting out of his ears and thundering Jeremiads erupting from his mouth, I was to be disappointed. He’s what Jewish folk call a Mensch. M was a friendly, approachable, reasonable, likeable guy. We found plenty to talk about, including tales of his brothers and mine.

M described himself as “center right” to my center left. Fair enough. What I had hoped going in was to figure out what had whipped his smoldering distrust of government into flame.

In some respects, M and I may as well have been born on different planets. My family was middle class. My father, Maurice George Whale, was an electrical engineer at Boeing. My mother, Irene, was a registered nurse. In addition to my brothers, Jim(deceased), Matt and Jack, I have two sisters: Carole the eldest of the West Coast Whale kids; and Diane.

M’s tough-as-nails mother raised her six boys on her own, in a “hell hole” of poverty and crime, his choice words for Burndale Homes. He came by his contempt for former President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and his Great Society programs honestly: he lived it.

I’d seen this sort of thing years before, when King County government burned one of my brothers so badly with the land-use restrictions that he packed up most of his pod of Whales and moved to Idaho. It turned him sharply against anything that smacks of liberalism.

So here at last is my central point. What the lunch accomplished is I have a more comprehensive understanding of where he and big brother are coming from. They’ve been burned.

That’s what talking and listening to people with whom we may disagree can accomplish. We may even find them likeable, decent human beings.

Try it.

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@auburn-reporter.com.