Manifesto

Be kind.

It's simple, but it's easy to forget in the moment, mired in the details. Every religion points to it. When all other things are stripped away, it is the lesson I come back to, again and again.

Be kind.

To yourself. To others. In spite of all complications, excuses, reasons not to do it, reasons I, or you, or they, do not deserve it, will not accept it, reciprocate it, capitalize on it, make the most of it, still...

Be kind.

I participated in Austin's iteration of the post-inaugural women's march. I like "iteration" in this context. Google's definition includes, in part, "...a procedure in which repetition of a sequence of operations yields results successively closer to a desired result." So I choose to see Austin's march as a repetition of a sequence of operations that occurred in D.C., and New York, and Boston, in Madison, Chicago, Los Angeles, in cities across the nation and around the world. I'm not sure what the desired result was, specifically. I don't think there was one, but many, as many desired results as there were marchers. The signs covered topics as diverse as the people who carried them. To me, they were the insistence on the humanization of people who feel that they have been or will soon be dehumanized.

I've been listening to podcasts lately. I know, I'm late to the podcast party. The pods on which they were originally cast are obsolete now, tearing through 1st, 2nd, 6th, 7th generations in the blink of an eye before giving way to the ubiquity of the phone that can do it all now. So yes, I'm years late in coming to the iPhone party and the podcast party. But I'm catching up. I started with "This American Life" and "The Moth," as many have, I'm sure. I gravitate towards the ones that humanize us all and tell stories. My favorites are "Radiolab" and "Found" and "Love + Radio" and "Snap Judgment" and "Twisted Storytellers" and "Homemade Stories" and "The Heart." I also like fiction podcasts, like "Homecoming" and "The Truth," and true crime podcasts like "Serial" and "Crimetown." Sometimes I get political, with "On the Media" and "Created Equal." But the ones that I love best are the ones that embody what Glynn Washington of Snap Judgment has said several times: "It's harder to hate someone when you know their story."

I've volunteered a couple of times at a free clinic that provides health care services to uninsured people who do not qualify for services from other sources. They operate on grant money out of a triple-wide trailer on the grounds of a local church that lets them stay rent-free and pays their water bill for them. I listened to the Executive Director talk about what they do, and how, and the ways in which the people they serve come to them, come to need their services. The people who need help, who are helped by government programs and by NGOs and churches and private charity, these people are not they. They are we. And the simplest thing that we can do is: be kind.

My girlfriend works at an alternative high school that specializes in helping adults who dropped out of high school come back, participate in a full curriculum for a diploma that is not an equivalency. She hears daily the challenges and obstacles her students face in working toward an achievement that has real potential to affect generational change for them and for their families. The challenges are real. Their histories are real. Their stories are compelling. Not all of them will make it to that goal. But there's no reason why one of those obstacles that they will face should be the unkindness of strangers. So: be kind.

I've read this article, "How to Culture Jam a Populist in Four Easy Steps" by Andrés Miguel Rondón, several times over the last couple of days. It's a Venezuelan advice column for Americans struggling with how to resist a regime of which they are deeply afraid. I am afraid, too. I am a heterosexual white male of the American middle class. I have the least reason to be afraid, but I am afraid of what is to all appearances a hardcore rejection of basic ideas of human decency. I do not know the degree to which I will take political action. Even in marching, I bailed out early to go get lunch. But I will do this: I will raise my hand. I will stand among the people who are standing. I will add my voice to the chorus of people who are shouting, "We will not stand quietly and watch us go backward, away from fairness and equity, away from kindness and decency, away from truth and responsibility to all people."

I believe in my heart that each of us is and should be and has a right to be the self we are at the core. We can believe and act and dress and speak how we want. We can kiss and love and marry and fuck and divorce and remarry who we choose and who choose us. We cannot hurt each other. We cannot deprive each other of consent. But we can be we, all of us. Each of us. Every single one of us. Not one of us can understand another's journey, the hows and whys of the way they came to this moment and place. Not one of us, nor any group of us, can judge and assign value to another's life, or choices, or struggles.

So I will speak up when one among us is bullied, and I will teach my son to do the same. So I will stand here and say: be kind.