• Painting for my first grandchild in progress

It is indeed easy to love those to whom we are closely related. However more difficult is our responsibility to treat with loving kindness those with whom we differ. Peggy Noonan notes in The Wall Street Journal that social media has reduced discussion to “snotty potshots.”  James Bowman writing in The New Criterion points out that “anyone can be angry, but it takes effort to think.”

We owe each other at least an effort to think beyond potshots.

Wiliam Penn puts it in perspective. “I expect to pass through life but once. If therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do to any fellow being, let me do it now, and not defer or neglect it, as I shall not pass this way again.”