If anyone watched Bill O’Reilly’s interview with President Obama before the super bowl you heard him say something I thought was very enlightening. First off, props to Mr. O’Reilly for conducting a tough, probing, and I think fair interview, during which he asked the question, “What do you think about all the people who hate you? You are aware that people hate you?” To which Pres. Obama responded “…the people that hate you, the people that dislike you, don’t really know you.”
It really bothers me when I hear people make personal assaults on individuals they know nothing personal about. People did this when Bush was president. They would say things like, “He’s just a warmonger. All he cares about is oil. He’s trying to fix his daddy’s mistake. He’s an evil person.” The truth is none of these people know him personally at all.
Now you could say, “you know a tree by it’s fruit”, or something like it. Okay, so then what fruit shows that Bush is evil? Or Obama, or Clinton? We can say that Hitler and Stalin and Saddam Hussein were evil because we know they were responsible for the deaths of millions by calculated design. Our presidents were just ordinary men with extraordinary vision or ability. They were voted in democratic elections that are the fairest in the world. They belong to the most balanced government in the world. If you believe their policies had terrible outcomes, or were poorly designed that is not the same as saying they were designed by evil men. I do not believe any popular political stance in our country is evil, but many are greatly misguided. Both Obama and Bush shared similar values, but their hierarchy of values and means to achieve them were vastly different. Obama is not evil, at least not based on what we see of him- God may know differently, and about you and me as well- you just hate his policies and the image that you see and hear portrayed in our culture. To put it another way, I do not believe either raising or lowering taxes is inherently evil.
It saddens me to think that all of the great work that Martin Luther King and others have done to get Americans to see beyond race we’ve merely exchanged one prejudice for another. One hatred for another; one easy solution for another. The trouble is; I’m afraid this is how people vote in large part. It may not matter to Obama right now that the people who dislike him merely don’t know him, but it will next summer. People who dislike you won’t vote for you, and he knows this, regardless of what he accomplishes in his term.
But presidents aren’t the only ones we pass judgment on without knowing are they? We do it because it’s easy. It’s easy to say they’re just a bum, or a drug addict, or a tax collector, or a liberal, or an adulterer, but Christ cautioned us to take the plank out of our own eyes first. To see a person beyond what they have done is truly Christlike. Take the hard road. Get to know someone, and see what it costs. Learning the complexities of current domestic and foreign policies that face today’s legislators costs many a lifetime. Each of us has a responsibility to learn what we can though, and make an educated decision, not an ignorant one.
