1 John and love, respect and etc.

1 John 3:18

Dear children let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth

So, here in late September 2008 we find America in the throws of the election season with venom spewed on the Internet and television alike. Each ad escalating the bend of their agenda and informing all of us just how low, degraded, degenerate and awful the other side is. Yet the pollsters, pundits, talking heads and media moguls alike sometimes wonder why America is a petty, foolish, selfish, self serving and punitive place. Is it any wonder?

When contemplating this verse from first John its easy to see that in America we don’t love with word, tongue, action or truth. We embroil and embody at times the worst in terms of human characteristics as all people do at times. This petty selfishness boils over in almost all aspects of day to day life. On our highways common courtesy is all but gone. Drivers willfully scoff law, drive at high rates of speed, weave in and out of traffic, litter, drive drunk and completely disregard their fellow human beings. In a word their actions embody hate, disrespect and selfishness.

In the grocery store, many people walk and talk with a cell phone to their ear so that they can avoid any sort of interaction with fellow human beings. You see I believe that it is easy to justify being rude to others if you have a phone to your ear because your mindset from the start is one of debasement of others. To simplify this observation, it’s like this, the telephone talker won’t even hang up a phone to deal with, interact with or be polite to other people right before them. The justification, well I was…on the phone, those real people around me or near me in real time, don’t count and don’t matter. Of course on the flip side, many a store clerk works with a phone to the ear so that they don’t have to humanize those that are right in front of them. Simply put this is meanness and disrespect at its level best.

Nightly on television we are faced with more channels than not that spin their take on the day’s events. It really doesn’t matter which side of the aisle you sit, it is spin. What most folks don’t realize is that television time, and most importantly “news” is a commodity that is for sale and that the owners of television stations don’t care what they sell over the public trust airwaves. To that end I had a television executive tell me so.

I had an email discussion with the news room manager of WRAL television here in Raleigh where I told him he should be ashamed by what his station transmits in terms of political ads. His response, don’t blame us we don’t make it, we just transmit it. To whit, my response was right on. By transmitting you are culpable. He just wouldn’t see it that way. Kind of like a Nazi dropping gas at Auschwitz and saying don’t blame me, I just drop it I don’t manufacture it. Is the Nazi soldier that drops the gas any guiltier or less guilty than the capitalist that makes the gas? I don’t think so. What fascinated me most with respect to the executive at WRAL was his complete disregard for his own and his company’s personal truth.

So then, what is the answer? I know for me it is staying out of the twenty four hour news cycle, its hype and lack of truth. For me it is a keen understanding that every ad, commercial and television talk show is trying to sell me something. It is tucking my cell phone away when in store and smiling at others and saying hello, it is driving the speed limit, letting others in ahead of me and attempting to be the person God expects me to be and my parents wanted me to be. Do I fall short? Absolutely, does that mean I stop trying, absolutely not.