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On moderating extremes: Laura and Mark take StoryCorps’ One Small Step

Laura Towns, left, sat down for a StoryCorps' One Small Step conversation with Dr. Mark Sand, a retired cardiac surgeon. Towns is an actress and married mother of two who recently moved to the Apopka area. Sand spent 26 years as a surgeon in Central Florida.
Abe Aboraya
Laura Towns, left, sat down for a StoryCorps' One Small Step conversation with Dr. Mark Sand, a retired cardiac surgeon. Towns is an actress and married mother of two who recently moved to the Apopka area. Sand spent 26 years as a surgeon in Central Florida.

Have you ever worried that you’re over-correcting your politics?

Laura Towns is an actress and married mother of two who recently moved to the Apopka area. Towns said she used to be very liberal, but she noticed her politics and beliefs beginning to change around 2019. She says now that she often finds herself more on the conservative side of issues, her goal is to not become too extreme.

“I feel like, as a liberal, I was, like, pretty extreme about how I felt about things,” Towns said. “I don't want to get to another extreme. … I feel like I'm more somewhere in the middle. Even though it's hard right now to be in the middle, because there's definitely things I do not agree with, even on the side that I vote for.”

This year, Central Florida Public Media and StoryCorps are bringing together strangers with differing politics for guided conversations - not to debate, but to find common ground. Towns sat down with Mark Sand, a retired cardiac surgeon who lives in Winter Park. Sand describes himself as socially liberal, but fiscally conservative.

“I think the country's on a fiscal crash path,” Sand said. “You can't keep going billions of dollars in debt and writing checks. I mean, that's going to have to get corrected. It's going to have to take out some tough choices to make that happen.”

Meet Laura Towns

Towns is originally from Southern Indiana, but at 20-years-old, moved to New York City to work as an actor.

She eventually left New York for Nashville, Tennessee and Birmingham, Alabama before recently moving to Central Florida. She said the biggest influence on her life was her parents.

Her parents ended up meeting each other because her dad was a helicopter pilot that flew an air ambulance, and her mom was a flight nurse. They eventually divorced, but were good co-parents before that “was even, like, a term.”

“My mom, she's this strong woman,” Towns said. “She's just always been this, in my view, just a vision of strength. Like she's had to take care of herself, and she made herself something from the bottom and worked her way to the top.”

Meet Mark Sand

Mark Sand grew up in upstate New York, and originally wanted to be an astronaut.

He got a degree in aeronautical engineering on an ROTC scholarship, which left him with a four-year commitment to the Air Force. After getting a master's degree in engineering, he switched career paths and went to medical school. Instead of flying planes, he spent his four years in the Air Force as a medical doctor, and spent the last 25 years as an open-heart surgeon in Central Florida.

He’s got four sons and four grandkids. Sand said growing up, his dad, who was more conservative, taught him about work ethic while his mom, more liberal, taught him about being committed to a community.

“She would support candidates and put yard signs out, and he never put a yard sign out,” Sand said. “Their relationship was that he let her be who she wanted to be. Never tried to constrain it or control it, which is a good life lesson when you're entering a partnership of any sort.”

The Takeaway

In the end, both Sand and Towns agreed that it’s important to have these kinds of conversations.

Towns said she learned it’s easy to sit and talk with someone who’s older.

“And just get to know somebody,” Towns said. “Even if we had met in a bar or something, we wouldn't have gotten into all of this and gotten this deep about it, you know, and covered all these things.”

Sand said a big part of our need in the U.S. is to have face to face conversations “and not rely on information that's filtered through a social media account.” He said people in the political middle don’t get heard.

“The extremes are polarized and amplified and and echoed, and so the middle conversations don't happen, but that's where, that's where the work gets done,” Sand said. “That's where the solutions get solved. When I'm looking at a politician, I'm not looking at their label necessarily. I'm looking at their ability to commit to solving problems.”

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