Recently I came across this great sentence in a book by Timothy Synder:
Our politics are too much about the curse of pain and too little about the blessings of liberty.
There is so much in that short sentence to unpack. Our politics is filled with too many grievance mongers and selfish, dishonest applause seekers instead of people trying to solve real problems and improve the lives of our citizenry. The blessings of liberty are about a free people coming together, working together, through their natural disagreements, finding compromise, and finding solutions through the democratic process. History reminds us that oligarchy, autocracy, chaos, and civil strife are the rule and democracy, peace, and the blessings of Liberty the exception.
What we need right now is more humility, grace, intelligence, and compassion and less of the dark, greedy, selfish, tribal hatreds from the curse-of-pain crowd that are always seeking attention and stoking fear. In this brief moment of history we have the blessings of Liberty and self governance and a way of life only dreamed of by millions of souls who came long before us across the great span of human history.
We need to constantly remind ourselves of this.
Jeff Wills 