Which would you rather have? A politician focused on keeping their promises, achieving honorable and worthy goals, telling the truth, and doing the greatest good for the greatest number of people or a politician focused on achieving celebrity status by making outrageous claims, playing loose and fast with the truth, stirring up discontent, calling opponents “losers, scum, disgraceful, vermin,” and making up derogatory and insulting names? Would you rather our representatives would display exemplary integrity, honesty, decorum, behavior, character and values or selfish, hostile, aggressive, violent, disrespectful, and contemptuous conduct? Well, guess what?

We are now living in a country where our elected leadership gives much more time, energy, and effort to mocking and attacking opponents than looking for ways to collaborate and create a viable future. Our media – social and corporate – has been weaponized and spends most of its time propagating discord, division, and discontent. Our political comedians hammer on humiliation, shaming, scorn, and ridicule, making insult comedy the default setting. While children are starving to death in Gaza, we fixate on Epstein. While war crimes are being perpetrated by Russia and Israel, we obsess about Diddy. As natural disasters destroy lives, we have to listen to administration officials whine about how they are portrayed on South Park. As our global economy is disrupted and our social protection agencies are being dismantled and destroyed, we’re more interested in eliminating our commitments to equity, inclusion, and the support of millions of immigrants that contribute to the strength, health, and vitality of our country.

Our elected leadership is not only allowing but promoting violence against their opponents. By turning opponents into enemies, the message sent is “anything goes.” Judges, governors, state representatives are being threatened, attacked, and even killed. The most outrageous, abominable and shameless voices attract and receive the greatest attention, inspiring multitudes of damaged individuals with mental health challenges, maturity issues, poor impulse control, lacking anger management to act out in the most destructive ways possible.

Legitimate and important protest often devolves into petty, profane, prejudicial and bigoted violence. The positive messaging, modeling, and witness in some of the most important protests – for due process, for the environment, for the end of war and war atrocities, for the economy, for jobs, for healthcare – gets lost in the aberrant behavior of a distinct minority of bad actors. The overwhelming number of champions of human rights in Gaza were eclipsed by a handful of pro-Hamas, anti-Israel malcontents, causing the less informed to label almost all pro-Palestinian protest as “antisemitic.” Shame on us.

So, why am I writing this? We can’t change the current culture and cure the dysfunction that is defining us. The problem is too large. But what we can do is NOT get sucked in, to not sink to the lowest level, to not act out in frustration and anger, but to choose to take the high road. Don’t be like those people, and DON’T GIVE YOUR SUPPORT OR YOUR VOTE TO SUCH PEOPLE!

This is nothing new, and it comes down to personal integrity. We can’t control how others think and act, but we can remember what Paul wrote to Colossae as we decide how we will think and act:

⁵ Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry. ⁶ Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. ⁷ You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. ⁸ But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. ⁹ Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices ¹⁰ and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. ¹¹ Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.

¹² Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. ¹³ Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. ¹⁴ And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity. (Colossians 3:5-14)