I don’t hate others. It is wrong, morally and theologically. Meeting the hatred of others with one’s own hatred only leads to chaos, hurt, and harm. I have no time for that. I do not want to look in the mirror and see that. When I feel hatred well up in me (which is another way of saying that I’m a human being), I accept it, feel it, and try to move on toward strength and acts of lovingkindness.

But that doesn’t make those who are agents of what I regard as destruction as my friends. Just because someone is not my enemy, does not make that person my friend. We must peacefully defeat the forces of hatred that Trump and other authoritarian leaders on both the right and the left are gathering across the globe. We must face those views down in the public square and must win at the ballot box. And we must try and try and try again until we succeed and humanity and our country and our planet can flourish and thrive.

Tom Friedman did this in “The World is Flat.” Obviously, world events have totally proven this thesis not only wrong, but profoundly wrong, especially in the U.S.–where we have never seen such a sharp division between rich and poor and the educated and not-as-well educated. The world still looks rather mountainous to me.

And now again we find the promise of Friedman shattered on the rocks of a horrifying murder of Jamal Khashoggi, apparently ordered by a cruel tyrant, posing as a modernizing member of a royal family–the very same prince to whom Friedman has cozied up and whom Friedman has praised for his visionary leadership of Saudi Arabia.

I’m not saying that we should be never pay attention to the favored clubby pundits that grace PBS, NPR, and the New York Times. They too have useful things to say. But, from now on, let us be more cautions when we read them (or listen to them). And may they use their powerful stoops to mix with the hoi-polloi and learn what real life is for a lot of people who do not run in the rarefied air of their intellectual circles.