I’ll never understand how this didn’t end the whole thing.
It is wild to me that this was not only NOT disqualifying but not even close to the bottom of what most of my country finds acceptable behavior from their leadership.
And before you start talking to me about “getting political,” let me just say that my entire issue with this election is that this is not a political issue.
Mocking a disabled person is distinctly NOT political. I wish we could talk about the election based on politics. I miss the days when we could argue about the utility or efficacy of food stamps and not why, in the name of all that is Holy, we are rewarding behavior that, in any other context, from any other person we would find abhorrent.
That’s what’s so maddening to so many people.
Most voters have apparently abandoned policies and plans. We are either too resigned to generate the energy required for long-term thinking and acting, or we settle for the easy hit of dopamine that comes from contempt or hatred.
In fact, I’m writing this because I am talking to myself about it, and I need to work this out so I can get back to functioning in the world with kindness – something that I've been sorely lacking in the last week.
The ease with which I slip into contempt shocked me this week, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
There’s a lot to be said about the act of mocking a disabled person in general, a lot to be said about doing it from as public of a stage as imaginable, a lot to be said about the people who laughed, and a lot to be said about the people who may not have laughed but have tacitly normalized it.
There’s just a lot to say.
But the one thing I am going to talk about is how unkind it is.
It’s hard to imagine I'll get any pushback that mocking people with disabilities is an unkind act – and frankly, if you do push back, then we don’t inhabit the same reality and likely have no practical common ground upon which to converse.
That act of publicly mocking a disabled person is an unkind thing to do. We need to agree on this or just stop reading; nothing else I say matters.
Being Kind is not the same as being Nice
I didn’t make this up, but it fits. As a broad, sweeping generalization, I make only for illustrative purposes: people from the West Coast tend to be nice but not kind, while folks from the East Coast tend to be kind but not nice.
For example, in Seattle, where I now live, people are famously nice. They are polite; they say please and thank you. But there is also something locals call the Seattle Freeze, which refers to the difficulty with which new arrivals are accepted into the existing social circles around them.
Said simply, they’re not.
It turns out Seattleites are friendly and cordial, but when it comes to extending themselves in a meaningful way and inviting you to the cookout, they’re just not gonna. This is what I mean by “nice but not kind.”
If you get a flat tire on the West Coast, someone will drive by and maybe see if you’re okay or maybe offer a phone to call AAA. They’ll express how sorry they are you’re dealing with this and then drive on.
Nice, but not kind.
Now, in New York, where I'm from, in my house, if you didn’t end the sentence in an expletive, it was like you said, please. At this moment, as a 61-year-old man, I have more than one text thread going with friends I've known as far back as kindergarten that are full of really bad-taste jokes about each other’s moms (may their memories be a blessing). We are not nice, but we rarely turn anyone away from joining us in anything.
In New York, if you get a flat and need help, someone will stop, get out of the car, call you a schmuck for not having a spare, tell you to get in their car, take you to their friend’s shop, explain to their friend that you, the idiot, didn’t have a spare, the friend will also call you a dumbass, then get in his tow truck, drive you back, fix the tire, and berate you one last time for not having a spare before leaving.
Kind but not nice.
One can certainly be both nice and kind; that happens, and it is, well, nice.
But nice doesn’t get shit done on its own and is too often a way of hiding how little we actually care about the people around us.
Nice is fine, but kindness matters.
I am interested in kindness. I am interested in how we act when it means improving the quality of someone else’s life, even when that means we put our own comfort on hold for a bit.
And I think that’s where we need to put a popular notion to rest.
There’s a meme out there that asserts it costs nothing to be kind, and I don’t think that’s true.
Being nice costs nothing and makes almost no difference. Kindness can be an imposition, and if it’s going to make a difference, has the potential to have real, in-the-world costs.
The time it takes to get the tire is an expense (or an investment, depending on your view).
But that’s not the only kind of cost kindness demands.
There’s an internal psychological cost to kindness. Kindness requires thinking, which we are all way less likely to do than we care to admit.
It takes thinking of another above ourselves. In any act of kindness, our concern is on the other person; we are for the other person winning. Our actions are designed around their needs first and our own needs second.
While being nice might not cost anything, being kind surely does.
And because being kind requires caring about the outcomes others experience, this week has been hard for me.
Let’s go back to the outcome of the election.
The voters in my country have spoken, and not only did kindness lose, but I was told that, to a majority of people voting, it’s irrelevant to leadership.
Ok – deep breath.
To the degree we can think about kindness as a function of one's character, this election showed that the content of one’s character apparently DOES NOT MATTER to the majority of voters, and that has greatly dismayed those for whom it still does.
I woke up after the election asking, “How do I maintain my commitment that kindness matters, in the face of it so clearly not mattering to so many? “
It kinda pissed me off – and in seeing how pissed off I was, I could get in touch with the actual cost of kindness.
In my anger (queue Palpatine), I could feel the alternating waves of resignation and contempt rolling up in me.
The tables turned in me.
You don’t want kindness? OK, fuck you.
The unkindest position I could find was wishing the promised results of this election on the people who voted for them.
While we can argue about immigration, healthcare, child care, reproductive freedoms, etc., on a policy basis, I have nothing to say if these policies are not grounded in kindness.
The lack of kindness makes any policy discussion a non-starter for me.
Beyond that, I noticed it moved me off my own commitment to kindness in how I react to those who have abandoned kindness.
As someone who values kindness, I found this to be a problem.
I hadn’t experienced it before, but the results of this election showed me another cost to kindness: my righteousness.
While I can be judgmental and act kindly (as the idiot who didn’t have a spare in NY can attest), I cannot be righteous (and I certainly cannot let that righteousness slip into contempt and still remain kind).
Walking that line is more of a dance sometimes. Just finding the line took a few days after this election.
Here’s where I’m at for now: As a dad, I’ve watched my kids lean back in their chairs. I’ve warned them that if they keep doing that, they will push it too far, fall backward, and get hurt.
But, as is the way of children, they persist.
I warn them again.
They laugh.
Ok – now it’s time for some “fuck around and find out kindness.” There’s no malice in this. I don’t wish that they fall and get injured. In fact, I hope that if they fall, it’s not too bad, and I don’t need to wipe up blood or involve a hospital.
But I am going to let them find out themselves.
There’s a kindness in this.
Taking away the opportunity to learn from mistakes falls far closer to being nice than being kind.
It turns out it's unkind to help a chick out of the egg.
Thinking we are being kind to a chick as it struggles to escape the egg by cracking it for them, we rob the chick of the opportunity to develop the muscles it needs to survive. Our helping it has doomed it.
Being kind sometimes means letting people struggle. Letting people figure it out on their own.
But it needs to be absent contempt. Absent righteousness. Absent malice. And unfortunately, those emotions come for free.
Anger (and the rest of those adjacent emotions) cost nothing upfront. They are a use now, pay later phenomenon. Kindness, on the other hand, requires us to pay before we play.
My kindness is not free in either of these two cases (my relationship with the people who voted for unkindness or my kid in the chair).
Contempt is free. Anger is free. Righteousness is free.
But kindness is intentional. Kindness requires thoughtfulness. It requires giving something up (contempt, anger, righteousness) and being prepared to act in a way that furthers our communal well-being when it comes time to act.
Kindness is not free, but the cost of it being missing is far more significant.
So, for now, I work on my own reactivity. My willingness to behave unkindly has provided me with a deeper insight into those who voted unkindly. I am not above or better than them. We all share the opportunity to choose between kindness and malice—it’s one of the most profound measures of our shared humanity.
Approaching this election from that perspective, I am left with an uncomfortable chance to demonstrate kindness in the face of others' malice.
I hear Viktor Frankl newly when he says, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
That is now my charge.
This is a moment filled with the profound opportunity Mandela points to when he says, “Our human compassion binds us the one to the other—not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learned how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.”
It is an ancient Jewish precept; if not me, who? If not now, when?
So, the way forward needs to start with me. As much as I'd like to slip into hating the outcome, all I have is working on myself as I move forward with kindness.
And that’s all I got for now.
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