“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle.”
― Plato

This year, my wife and I decided that instead of sending out Christmas cards, we’d produce a video for Christmas. A couple of ideas were discussed and dismissed. Since the plan was to personally text or email our friends and family, the message should have deeper meaning than something humorous or superficial.

Looking back on 2018, we’ve seen an increasing lack of civility in our culture. The anger, name-calling and all that has come out of the current state of sociopolitical polarization has been a point of concern in our family. So, we decided to frame the video around a message of compassion for one another. We may not agree on politics, climate science, or gun control, but can’t we do it respectfully? What kind of example are we setting for our children? To quote the Sun Journal’s Michael Bloom:

“Children are very impressionable and will use their newfound ways of settling their own arguments in the way in which they have been taught.”

As the headlights of 2019 loom larger and larger, let’s resolve to embrace the better angels of our nature and one another. It could make the difference in someone’s day.

Best wishes for a Merry Christmas and compassionate New Year.

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”   — Abraham Lincoln