I remember seeing a T Shirt one time that said (in it’s efforts to be provocative, and in no way serious…) “But what about all the GOOD things Hitler did?”

Unequivocally, people aren’t simply “good” or “bad” and things aren’t “black” or “white” no matter how much we want them to be.  Now, I’m not going to say that Hitler wasn’t evil incarnate, because by all accounts he was.  But I am also not going to take any of the popular positions that Trump, Biden, Obama, Bush, Reagan, Carter were, either…even though you can find plenty of people who will argue differently on all of these accounts.

Everything is grey, and life is very messy.

Very messy.  And never crystal clear.

I’m pondering all of this because I saw a bumper sticker that said “Jesus loves all of the people you hate” for sale on eBay and it was tagged as “anti-Trump.”  I’m sorry…that isn’t “anti-Trump” it’s anti-HATE.  And what concerns me most is that the idealism that drives this country has devolved into too much hate all around me.  I cannot abide people who justify hatred in the name of disagreeing with others.  I cannot abide people who justify hatred because “the other side hates, so why shouldn’t we?”

I cannot abide…really, any of it. 

Jesus loved everyone… He admonished and rebuke the ones who he couldn’t abide, but he loved them, every one.

Charlie Kirk shared some very pointed opinions.  I didn’t agree with very many of them.  But, I did in fact agree with some of them.  And the only way I was able to discern what his positions were was in parsing all of the information I could surrounding his narrative. 

People shouldn’t form opinions from news blurbs. 

People shouldn’t form opinions from Tik Tok videos.

People shouldn’t form opinions from social media, ever, ever. I’m going to write soon about this albatross of misinformation that we are facing in the world right now that is only getting worse and worse as artificial intelligence becomes more and more prevalent. Anyone who still reads a headline, clicks on an article, turns on a news station and that is their singular source of the truth is living in complete darkness and have no basis to form a stable opinion.  Just consider the number of news articles today (9/14/25) that stated there were shots fired at Worlds of Fun last night, when the official response from the park and KCMO police are that no, in fact, it was just fireworks. The problem is that once misinformation gets put out into the world, we can’t put it back in the box.  It takes on a life of its own, and nowadays there are enough people that want any number of things to be true to continually breathe life into falsehoods.