January 27, 2026
Dear editor;
Have we had enough hostility and chaos from all sides? It was Abraham Lincoln who counselled, “We’re just about as happy as we decide to be.”
What’s true with people is also true with nations. Our political and media leaders at all levels should be cautioned that their actions and rhetoric either contribute to or detract from our happiness as a choice, a matter of personal perspective, and emotional control.
Elections are sometimes won and sometimes lost. Obviously, the reason why there are terms in office of two-, four-, and six-years is to provide the realization and comfort that political victories and defeats are finite. We can work to make changes…but peacefully and without rancor.
We can choose to take our neighbors constructively by the hand and by the heart, or take them destructively by the throats. My guess is that your experience in life has been the same as mine: Anger never helps a situation and certainly raising our voices at each other only intensifies unhappiness.
As a young freshman State senator in Springfield in 1993, you gave me the privilege to stand at the small desk in the old Illinois State Capitol where Lincoln delivered the great and wise words, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
It breaks my heart that Americans then ignored his (Biblical) advice, as thoroughly as we seem to be ignoring it now.
Six hundred and fifty thousand dead members of families was the price paid then. Can’t we learn a little patience and humility before God and each other from that tragedy?
You and I decide. Our minds and hearts are their own places; in themselves can make a heaven of hell, a hell of our heaven.
Chris Lauzen, former State senator and Kane County Board chairman, current Kane County treasurer