By Erich Mische,President Donald Trump

Copyright minnpost

This piece isn’t about one president. It isn’t about one political party. It isn’t about one ideology. Hate has been with us a long time. It crosses elections, administrations, movements and generations.

What should terrify us is how comfortable we’ve become with it, how quickly we excuse it when it comes from our side and how easily we wield it against anyone on the other.

I have seen this hatred for a long time. It didn’t start with this president or this party. But in this moment, it feels sharper, meaner, more corrosive to our country than at any other time in my lifetime. This commentary is my line in the sand: we need to do something more than hate.

This is not about whether democracy is on the ropes. It is about whether decency in our democracy is gone.

At a memorial service for Charlie Kirk, these words were spoken by President Donald Trump: “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them.”

At that same service, Erika Kirk, grieving the murder of her husband, said, “The answer to hate is not to hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”

Months ago, after their parents were assassinated, Sophie and Colin Hortman said, “Hope and resilience are the enemy of fear. Our parents lived their lives with immense dedication to their fellow humans. This tragedy must become a moment for us to come together. Hold your loved ones a little closer. Love your neighbors. Treat each other with kindness and respect. The best way to honor our parents’ memory is to do something, whether big or small, to make our community just a little better for someone else.”

Three moments. Three choices. Hate. Love. Hope.

In her grief, Erika Kirk offered up a benediction of forgiveness.

In their grief, Colin and Sophie Hortman offered a communion of hope.

In his blasphemy, the president offered up a homily of inhumanity.

And that brings us to a harder truth: It’s not about what party we belong to, what faith we practice, or what side we vote for.

It’s about what kind of humans we choose to be.

Are we the kind of people who extend forgiveness in the face of loss?

Are we the kind who cling to hope when everything has been torn away?

Or are we the kind who choose hatred at a memorial meant to honor a slain husband, father, and friend?

Where and when and how does all of this hatred end?

We can keep pointing at this person or that person, that political party or the other one. The Christian, the Jew, the Muslim, the atheist. The legal immigrant or the one here illegally.

We can keep embracing those in power in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere in America who have perfected their formula of dividing us into an art form and blame them.

Or we can start doing what we need to do as Americans and have an intervention with ourselves. We are to blame for America today. They didn’t do it to us. We did it to ourselves. We, the People.

And we are to blame for all of it. We don’t get to walk away easy or free. We can post all we want with our selective outrage and act as though we don’t carry the stench of our division on our own shoes. But when we do that, we are only lying to ourselves.

We need to reconcile this now. We need to stop looking for who is to blame for when this started. We need to start looking at ourselves for who, why and when we are going to fix it.

If not each of us, then who? Our political leaders? Religious leaders? Business leaders? Big Tech leaders? Unlikely.

We, the People started it. We, the People can end it.

The 1970s comic strip Pogo uttered the immortal line: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” In 2025, that is the indictment of America.

Erika Kirk’s words are a mirror of Christ’s teachings.

Sophie and Colin Hortman’s words reflect the path Jesus walked on Earth.

The president’s words are the rejection of God’s greatest gift to all of us: the ability to forgive our enemies and love them in the same breath.

We, the People, must end hate.

Or hate will end us.

Erich Mische is a nonprofit leader and author.