Merry Christmas and Chag Chanukah Sameach from the Cobb County Courier. I’d say Eid Mubarak, too, but Ramadan doesn’t begin until late February this cycle.

As editor and publisher of the Cobb County Courier, my holiday season wish is simple this year.

If I could choose three words for how everyone should approach this season, I’d choose compassion, tolerance, and love.

And I’d also advise everyone to relax and keep things simple.  You don’t need to recreate National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation every year.  

The internet is very short on compassion unless you deliberately seek it out. When it is displayed, it’s often ridiculed as naive, empty, or “virtue signaling.”

Compared to most people, I’ve been on the Internet for a very long time. In my previous career, I was a programmer and systems administrator. I got my first account on the Internet under my membership in the Association for Computing Machinery during the 1980s.

There was little difference in the level of compassion exhibited online in the 1980s and the present. “Flame wars,” as they were called then, would break out over amazingly meaningless things. My least favorite was the programming language war. Most programming languages had the same basic capabilities by then, yet rather than spend time creating software in their favorite languages, developers often spent hours per day on Usenet battling the opposing side.

The difference today is that there are many more people on the Internet, and the general nasty tone doesn’t stay online but often spawns full-fledged hate movements.

And now, the typical “enemy” on the internet isn’t the advocates for another geek-world language, tool, or protocol but has spilled over into people of different races, religions, nationalities, sexual orientations, genders, ideologies, or any of dozens of other ways people sort themselves into friends and enemies.

I’m not saying that people should give up their passion for whatever belief (ideological or religious) they practice. Or that people shouldn’t have pride in the culture they were raised in.

But it should not be at the expense of tolerance and compassion. The world is becoming increasingly populous and diverse, and we’ll have to be able to work things out among ourselves if any semblance of progress that brings a decent quality of life is to be achieved.

We shouldn’t limit this sense of compassion to the holiday seasons either, any more than we should not try to improve ourselves beyond our New Year’s resolution list.

One way to slow things down and increase the possibility that your reactions to other people will be compassionate rather than nasty is to think before you act, talk, or post on the Internet. We republished an article from The Conversation that explored that practice. You can read the article here. Another article, also republished from The Conversation, advises “chilling out” rather than “blowing off steam.”

However you do it, I hope you have a great holiday season, a fantastic 2025, and that you do it with compassion, tolerance and love.