Praise the Lord last week is finished.
Don’t get me wrong - I enjoyed celebrating my infant daughter’s first birthday. I also enjoyed cooler temperatures last Monday and Tuesday, albeit I wasn’t a fan of the high winds.
What I didn’t enjoy was my in-laws in Conroe being out of power for nearly a week. Fortunately, their power was restored Sunday morning.
Hurricane Beryl was the culprit for my in-laws and many in the Greater Houston Area losing power. Beryl also was the reason why we in Freestone County had cooler temperatures, rain and wind last Monday and Tuesday.
We invited my in-laws to come to Fairfield until power was restored, but they chose to run their generator or stay with neighbors who had power restored 2-3 days after Beryl hit the area. Thankfully, they have power again.
The other thing that I didn’t enjoy was an assasination attempt on former President/current presidential candidate Donald Trump. While I do not claim affiliation to any political party, I do not condone what happened Saturday afternoon in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Where are we in society? Have we become too intolerant of differences in opinion?
It’s time for us to quit allowing things like difference of opinion or political affiliation divide us. Different doesn’t mean wrong, it means different.
One step that we need to take if we’re going to be united and not divided is learning how to listen to things that we may not want to hear. If I get diagnosed with cancer, I’m not going to start a riot because I didn’t want to hear that I had cancer.
It’s perfectly fine to be upset when you are forced to listen to something that you don’t want to hear. But it’s not OK to lash out in violence or destructively.
I recall during a postgame interview what the coach of the team who lost the game said. “We need to learn to handle adversity as well as we handle success.”
The same can be said for listening to people who deliver bad news or different opinions. We need to learn how to listen to what we don’t want to hear as well as we listen to what we want to hear.
There’s nothing wrong with protest. As long as protest is done peacefully.
There’s no excuse to attempt murder on someone who might disagree with you politically or religiously. The suspected would-be assassin didn’t need to be at the Trump Rally in the first place.
As a country, let’s get back to putting differences aside and working together for the common good of our nation. It’s time for assassination attempts and violence toward people who have different views to be finished.
Jason Chlapek is the general manager of the Fairfield Recorder. He can be reached at editor@fairfield-recorder.
