OP I N I O N

THE SOAPBOX

By Nate Graziano

For the past 11 months, it has been a challenge to follow the news without a prescription for Zoloft, and with the recent spree of murders, followed by a bevy of vile lies, it has become exponentially more difficult.

Merry Christmas, Uncle Scrooge. 

I’m speaking, of course, first about the tragic shooting at Brown University in Providence, where afterwards the alleged assassin then escaped and drove north to Brookline, Mass., killing an MIT professor, before riding to a storage unit in Salem, NH,, and taking his own life. 

Then there was also the senseless slaughter of renowned actor and director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele by their son, Nick, a schizophrenic who brutally stabbed his parents to death. 

The morning after the murders, our debased and delusional commander-in-chief then took to Truth Social and wrote an utterly repugnant and insensitive rant about Reiner’s politics, reframing the tragedy to make it about himself, his petty grievances and his insatiable lust for vengeance. 

But one vile act is not nearly enough to sate this narcissist, so he then put up plaques in his “Presidential Walk of Fame” in The White House colonnade, disparaging his predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama, because Donald Trump is truly that small.

The sum of this amounts to a veritable dearth of decency, something this country is in desperate need of discovering. 

Decency is defined by Merriam-Webster as “behavior that conforms to accepted standards of morality and respectability.”

Granted, morality is not always black and white, and plenty of people prefer to not “conform” to society’s standards and expectations. However, being a non-conformist does not absolve a person from being a “decent” human being.

And decent human beings do not, as a practice, willfully harm other people—physically, verbally or psychologically. While everyone has lapses in decency—our flaws make us human—most people who aren’t sociopaths or suffering from a debilitating mentally illness have the capacity to recognize and reflect on their behaviors and work toward becoming better people.

Part of the appeal of the holiday season—whether you believe it is contrived or not—is the fact that it is the one time of the year, a period of a few weeks, where human beings demonstrate their capacity to behave decently toward one another. 

With all of this violence and vitriol being dispensed in the media, it should serve as an impetus for all of us to be better. So in the next few days leading to Christmas, where many of us will gather with our loved ones, I am pleading with all of you to be kind to others and carry this throughout the new year as well. 

It sounds like a “decent” idea to me.      

   You can reach Nate Graziano at ngrazio5@yahoo.com