Watch the You Tube videos of town hall meetings across America or tune in to conservative talk radio, and it’s really clear that people are angry with the direction the country is headed. This is beginning to show up in polls, such as the Rasmussen Report today that shows President Obama for the first time well below majority approval at just 47 percent:

Overall, 47% of voters say they at least somewhat approve of the President’s performance. That’s the lowest level of total approval yet recorded. The President’s ratings first fell below 50% just a few weeks ago on July 25. Fifty-two percent (52%) now disapprove.

Whether it is the prospect of a government takeover of health care, or simply the notion that folks in Washington are spending our future into bankruptcy and destroying the economy, I understand why people are upset.
That said, we still have the ability to channel that anger into political activism in a productive way. We have the ability to undo what ails us through persuasion and through the ballot box.
What could derail these efforts are for people to get out of control and start doing stupid and wrongful things, like threatening the life of the president and his family. Not only is that a crime, but it makes it easy for the mainstream media to do what it always wants to do — discredit genuine, normal conservative activism by associating it with potentially violent extremists. (Of course they always ignore the liberal extremists. Protesters equating President Bush with Hitler a few years ago were celebrated as passionate Americans promoting robust debate, rather than the nutjobs they were.)
Meanwhile, the Christian community needs to avoid getting sucked into crazy, irrational and unblblical thinking like promoting the video that suggests President Obama is the anti-Christ. Christian thinker John Mark Reynolds says it well in a recent blog post.
So stay angry, stay involved, but be smart, ethical and civil. As the new poll numbers indicate, the swing voters in America are already moving in a common sense direction. Let’s not slow the momentum by doing or saying stupid or destructive things.