We need to step up and show up with kindness

The holiday season invites us not only to make resolutions for the new year but also to reflect on our lives and our actions, our values and beliefs. It is the time when we turn the corner of the calendar from the darkest days to increasing light.

This year, the spirit of peace and love that lights up the holidays stands in sharp contrast to the daily turbulence that fills our airwaves, newspapers and social media. We live with increasing uncertainty, divisiveness and discord. The angry rhetoric and fear, the greed and violence, that seem to dominate the news points us more clearly than usual toward the need to remember our common humanity and the constructive powers of light and love that are foundational to the holidays.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said with deep faith that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. I believe this can only happen if each one of us helps it to bend that way.

We can do so by being respectful with our speech, treating others as we would wish to be treated, choosing kindness over judgment, humility over certainty and compassion over

self-interest.

Let us model for our families, our communities — and yes, our politicians — ways to honor the intrinsic goodness and equality of all human beings.

In these anxious and fragile times, it becomes incumbent upon each of us to both step up and show up.

And so I would like to invite us all (myself included) to become a part of the necessary change: to practice as best we can our values, the values of our faiths and the moral imagination that can help our democracy fulfill its ideals.

Wishing us all sweet holidays and a new year of increased civility, kindness, shared joy and peace.

Michael S. Glaser, St. Mary’s City