I sat at my desk lis­ten­ing to the New Age chan­nel on Slacker Radio, wind­ing up the day at 6pm — delighted at the humon­gous eco­nomic devel­op­ment announce­ment at work today  and the FACT that we’ll be con­duct­ing the first mass mobile reg­is­tra­tion in the area on Sep­tem­ber 22 at Down­town Col­lege­town Party on the Square via Job Rooster (more to come on JR very soon!). I worked on some details for the Great­est Col­lege Intern­ship Pro­gram on Earth hatched in con­cept last Octo­ber and was psy­ched about what’s on the hori­zon for NEPA POWER! and how well Job Magic is work­ing to get the word out about area oppor­tu­nity via social media (sorry — more on that later too!).

Those are just some of the things I am über excited about and can’t wait to share with you. It was another very good day — the kind I typ­i­cally have.

Then there was this…

Before I pow­ered down the por­tal to the world I clicked on the news. Look closely at the screen shot in this post and you’ll see what I saw at that moment. No amount of Karunesh qui­ets the ugly voices of esca­lated hatred and intol­er­ance that become louder and louder each day — in print, radio, TV, elec­tronic media and orga­nized gath­er­ings by our own brand of home grown extrem­ists who con us into Gen­ovese syn­drome and jump­ing off vir­tual bridges because every­one else is doing it. Prop­ping up their pop­u­lar­ity through pro­mot­ing fear in soci­ety they delight in fan­ning the flames.

The dif­fi­cult times of the past nine years and result­ing trauma to our national psy­che have put us in a posi­tion of fear and defen­sive­ness. It’s not an intel­li­gent stance and it’s not becom­ing to us as a nation and a peo­ple. We are bet­ter than this. We are more inno­v­a­tive than this. We love life more than to allow our­selves to be dom­i­nated by this.

I’m call­ing for all ratio­nal thinkers to stand up and speak up, to help oth­ers under­stand that fol­low­ing celebrity cult politi­cians and preach­ers who are extreme or fun­da­men­tal­ist in their views are a dan­ger to our free­dom and lib­erty — for they have lit­tle or no tol­er­ance for those who think, act and look dif­fer­ently than they do. I am heart­bro­ken to see us los­ing ground in diver­sity and accep­tance of oth­ers and gain­ing pro­fi­ciency in divi­sive­ness and hate.

Life is too short to live in hate.