By David Hegg Since we live in a world enamored with vitamins and supplements, I’d like to suggest four “ethical vitamins” for a better societal life in 2025. As I have viewed the public discussions regarding justice, race, politics, and progress in America, it has been discouraging to see how poorly we conduct civil, intellectually honest, and beneficial conversations.   We must improve our ability to take in facts, process them through an informed, logical, and ethical grid, and propose valuable, workable answers and solutions. Otherwise, we will continue to foster regrettable division and the damage it always entails. Here are my “ethical vitamins” for the new year.  1. Communicate, don’t just “send”: Communication is essential to profitable dialogue, but I fear we are more prone to use keystrokes in a relational vacuum and hit “send” than we are to do the hard work of face-to-face listening, understanding, and responding. Telling is never communicating. Communication is about creating awareness among all parties rather than merely firing off missiles of opinion. Invective may make you feel better, but if your goal is to improve a situation, an unemotional commitment to active listening and a winsome response will provide a much better and more ethically satisfying outcome.   2. Read, don’t just watch: Friends, you cannot entrust your mind to the mainstream media and count on them to provide the facts and commentary you need to make a proper, informed and ethically balanced decision on most things. In addition to obvious bias on all sides, complex issues cannot be described, interpreted, or solved in three-minute video segments. In these short, explosive segments, what is presented is designed for ratings and often realignment, not honest education.  We need to get back to reading, and by this, I mean books, essays and opinion columns on a broad scale. I will stop short of recommending my favorites, lest my own bias further invade this column. However, I recommend reading books by respected historians examining today’s political and social issues. Biographies of great men and women are also a must if we are to learn how time and culture affect societies and their lives.  3. Contemplate, don’t just react: We’ve all seen what reaction does as we’ve watched the recent firestorms become a political war zone for those for whom no tragedy should go wasted. We don’t have all the facts, but those in the business of shaping partial truths and appearances into political swords understand the power of getting to our minds first.   But,  it is far better to take in information from the best sources and analyze them before forming opinions. It is also necessary to hold back our emotional biases, and perhaps this is the hardest thing to do simply because we’ve all been programmed to be “incensed” when something “outrageous” happens. This is true on both sides of the racial and political aisles. But it just isn’t helpful! When emotion takes the engineer’s seat, we often find ourselves driven off the rails. Here’s a tip: Pretend you are a judge in a court of law and must analyze the facts presented and come to a judgment. Will you be fair and unbiased, or will you give in to the political and societal pressure surrounding you? You be the judge.  4. Improve, don’t just settle for progress: Americans have a deep sense that things will improve. However, hope based on the promise of progress has no benefit unless we all, as individuals, are determined to improve as people and as neighbors.   Progress is usually understood as the economy improving, crime diminishing, and people of all kinds having more opportunities to live better lives. But I suggest that this isn’t enough. We must also take personal responsibility for improving ourselves, regardless of circumstances.   Regardless of your situation, the best way to make 2025 a great year is to heed the advice from the pen of Shakespeare. In Hamlet, Polonius exhorts his son Laertes concerning his behavior as he embarks upon a university education. “This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” That is, be a person of virtue. Think, study, vigilantly guard your ethical convictions, and improve your character daily. Be the one who cleans up, speaks up, and lifts up those around you, and who knows? If we all improve, we’ll look back and see we made the best kind of progress in 2025.  Local resident David Hegg is senior pastor of Grace Baptist Church. “Ethically Speaking” appears Sundays.  The post David Hegg | Ethical Vitamins for 2025 appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.