The president of the United States of America is getting 30 death threats a day. They accuse the president of "trying to take over the country" with no apparent sense of irony.
Angry mobs are shouting down politicians and threatening violence. The signs they carry as almost as ugly as the views they carry inside them.
Hateful language and whisper campaigns have a choke-hold on our public discourse at a time when we have serious problems to deal with.
Domestic terrorists are killing those who disagree with them, and nobody's calling it terrorism.
These same voices are given airtime and column inches in the media, and very rarely are they called to task or confronted with facts. In the eyes of the media gatekeepers, they're just another "point of view."
Sure, we can sit back and act as though this will all work out for us in the end. More than a few of us have concluded that this is even a good thing. They're revealing how stupid and desperate they really are, some of us have remarked.
This might be a comforting thought, but there is poison in that path.
You can't let ideas like these fester inside you without it doing some real harm to yourself and to others. At the very least, it poisons our public discourse so good ideas are shouted down and can't get a foothold.
They are ugly. Their ideas are ugly. The expressions of these ideas are ugly.
We have to be beautiful.
I've said here numerous times that we are only as healthy and sane as our ideas are compassionate. I was cribbing from Kurt Vonnegut. I hope he won't mind me doing it again:
Here's everything you need to know for living on earth:
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you've got to be kind."
The other thing you might know about me is I spend a lot of time talking to conservatives, fundamentalists, Libertarians, Republicans and others. Hey, if Jesus talked to thieves and whores, so can I.*
A lot of people think this is a waste of my time, but I do not. The only thing they're lacking is compassion. They're not stupid. They really do think they have some good answers. And they would, if only they cared about people different from them.
Some of them I've spoken to over the years have come to see that even though they may not have to deal with a particular problem, it's still the compassionate thing to do to care about it anyway. Take health care for instance. Maybe it's not an issue for you, but you can still have enough empathy to understand, as some of my conservative friends have, that an affluent society owes people that potentially lifesaving protection.
Many fundamentalist conservative ideas crumble instantly in the presence of a simple faith in humanity, which I call compassion.
Hear now the depraved thoughts that lived until recently in the mind of George Sodini, a man who took three lives in a tragic shooting:
"Maybe soon, I will see God and Jesus. At least that is what I was told. Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell," Sodini apparently wrote, before adding later, "I was reading the Bible and The Integrity of God beginning yesterday, because soon I will see them."
What do you see? The sum of our works is eternal damnation?
This is the message he gleaned from the words and actions of Jesus Christ, a symbol of God's intention to redeem us all? Whether you're a Christian or not, you can see the bitter irony there. This way of thinking belies a shocking lack of faith in humanity.
We must be different. We must not let stories like these sap our own faith in our fellow human beings.
I believe mankind is basically good. I don't believe this because I am ignorant of reality or because my ears and eyes are willfully closed. I believe this in spite of all the evidence to the contrary -- evidence which mounts daily.
To achieve the political changes that we wish to achieve, we must change hearts and minds, to use a tired phrase. To change the hearts and minds of others, our own hearts and minds must be patient, calm and above all compassionate.
If you think me naive, consider the fact that everyone who's ever stood up and told us to get along and love one another, from Jesus to Gandhi to RFK to MLK, has wound up the victim of a violent end. Clearly, there's something in the message of compassion that ugly people with ugly hearts fear.
So while they may be ugly, we must be beautiful. We must do beautiful things. We must act beautifully to each other. We must treat the other side beautifully.
This is just another way I've found to say something I've been saying for years. I hope it has meaning for you. There is strength in compassion. It's a beautiful thing.