Let’s Be Kind First

Let’s try to be more kind rather than simply being so desperate to be found right. More interested in others than clinging to our own self-interest, and listen to learn rather listening solely for the sake of formulating counter arguments. Goodness knows, I wouldn’t mind carrying around a lot fewer hairline slices from the hateful crowd.

It’s a common enough scene for anyone who attended public schools: two boys facing off inside a circle of jeering fans, hooting with cruel laughter when either stumbles or gets a jab inside.

Thankfully I was never inside the inner circle nor supporting from the outer circle in that unfortunate situation but it always made me feel very sad to see how certain all the cheering fans seemed to be in their support of their chosen fighter. How can one be certain of the justice of the cause that spurred the fight in the first place? How does a fan come to believe that one or other of the two fighters is in the right without any clear evidence? And how so many kids support the fight in the first place? Sadly, I regret the couple of times when I could have stopped such scuffles but didn’t. Why do so many kids cheer it on?

The worst to come out of most of those types of brawls is typically maybe a black eye and some bruised pride. But today I’m seeing the same sorts of alliances, blind faith and support in their chosen fighter, and cruel hoots and cheap jabs in the way people bicker online and the consequences, though perhaps softer on the body, can bruise the much deeper parts of us.

I’ve shifted my approach to social media and so for the last year or two, I haven’t gotten the kind of ugliness that I used to get in response to my posts. But I certainly remember being called stupid, un-American, unpatriotic, traitorous, misguided, uneducated, blind, unfaithful to God, and going to hell sometimes by the very people who I thought supported and loved me: long-time friends and family.

I’m learned how to quickly disregard such vitriol because I intrinsically realize that the people posting these inflammatory comments aren’t really leveling them at me; they’re shouting them at people “like” me. But if I was to parse out the similarities and differences among the folks who these insults are meant to attack, I would bet I wouldn’t find very many similarities at all except for perhaps that we are from the same political party or religion or profession. In essence: they are lobbing hateful and hurtful things against me because they feel like I’m not a part of their tribe.

That leads me to believe that those insults aren’t so much targeted toward me because of who I am as much as for who I am not. And if these folks shouting at “my kind” were to do some introspection, I’d imagine they’d discover that their biggest cause of their lack of ease with people like me is that I am not like them. I did’t vote for the same person. I don’t live in the same state. We don’t drive the same kind of cars and we don’t view the challenge of climate change in the same way. I might view market economies a bit differently and though I consider human life a sacred thing, I might have a different view on rights for women and I might have different approaches to gun ownership regulation.

These kinds of differences have always existed. But now the fight is done in much more subtle of an arena. Now people can throw a collective jab in the form of a comment that takes five seconds to send and then retreat back into the internet void. Of course these jabs aren’t that brutal of injuries—more like hairline slices. Lately though, many of us have been so laden with paper cuts that we’re finding maybe that we’re sad more often than we are happy; that at the end of the day we have realized that we’ve had our shoulders hunched uncomfortably forward all day in a defensible stance just waiting for the next attack of indirect slights.

These interactions don’t necessarily make or break a mood. But they can certainly tip the scales. Where did we learn that it’s okay to appear on the scene briefly, shout often horrid things at each other, and then fade back into the audience assuming that if anybody has problems with what we just said then they are part of the problem we were just cursing about anyway and that people just need to not be so sensitive?

At least boys fighting in the schoolyard display the shred of honor and bravery enough to stand and be counted for what they are doing. “Yes, I know fighting is wrong and I probably will hurt this other boy and he’ll probably hurt me but at least I’m doing it full-heartedly, full of misguided passion. At least I’m demonstrating an undeniable conviction.” Now it takes no more than a a few seconds of anonymous meanness to injury one another—so lacking in conviction that the injured party might not have any chance to even defend themselves at all.

One argument I’ve heard as to why this is acceptable is that everybody has the same chance to throw jabs. The obvious problem with this is that in a fight with billions of opponents, if none of us have a means of defense, we are all going to be bruised and broken. Equitable perhaps but still sadly very unhealthy.

So what to do about this alarming shift in human inhumanity? I remember the first time I read Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” The concepts seemed so simple but as I practiced them I was amazed at how effective they were. Things like: “There is only one way to get the best of an argument -- and that is to avoid it." “Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.” “To be interesting, be interested” and “Criticism is dangerous because it wounds a person’s pride, hurts his sense of importance, and arouses resentment.”

The book was published over 80 years ago, but modern society is yet to learn these simple lessons. Let’s try to be more kind rather than simply being so desperate to be found right. More interested in others than clinging to our own self-interest, and listen to learn rather listening solely for the sake of formulating counter arguments. Goodness knows, I wouldn’t mind carrying around a lot fewer hairline slices from the hateful crowd.