1 Boring Old Man

Beyond the first African American president moniker, and in spite of challenge of the financial crisis and our two wars, even bigger than the blessed relief from the specifics of the Bush and Cheney Administration, I’m personally looking for something else from this changing of the guard. It’s hard to quite put it into words, but I think it’s something real close to what’s meant by the word kindness. It’s a word I’ve always liked because it’s best defined by using it’s root – kind. Kindness is treating others as if they are the same kind as you are. For some people, kindness is reserved for family and friends. For others, it’s extended to groups with shared adjectives – like race, or gender, or political party, or country of origin. But it’s the rare person who extends kindness to everyone – even though we’re all the same species, and we live in a country that avers that "all men are created equal."

I can’t bring it off either, but I’d like to at least have it as a wished-for ideal. The thing I like about Obama is that I think it is his ideal too – kindness. It’s the Christian ideal, at least by the Christianity that I was exposed to as a child – like the Golden Rule, or "judge not that ye be not judged," or "turn the other cheek," or "love thy neighbor as thyself." During the Civil Rights days, the churches didn’t seem to step up to the plate. And the current position of churches with homosexuals just seems very unkind to me. I came to believe that the church’s idea about sin or sinners was a loophole to allow unkindness. But it’s bigger than the church, it’s the attitude on the streets of America. The divisive political arena is anything but kind, paticularly with Nixon and now with Bush and Cheney. I don’t think they’re kind people, even in the ideal. Bush may say it in speeches, but not on his own. Cheney doesn’t show me an inkling that he even understands what it means.

The thing I’ve disliked the most about Bush’s America is that I’ve personally felt unkindly about our government and the people that put them there. I don’t think I even felt that way about the white racists back in the dark times. I saw them as deluded and afraid. I hated what they did, but saw it in the context of a shared "southerness." Their racism wasn’t a good thing, but I sort of understood how they got there. But specifically with the Nixon Administration and the Bush Administration, what kindness I’ve been able to muster in my life has disappeared much more than I’d like.

So what I’m looking for from Obama is a consistent modelling of his kindness, and he’s doing fine so far. I don’t think kindness is naive. One can be at war without being unkind. One can drive hard bargains and still treat others kindly. Just like one can feel really angry at a spouse or a child, and still act without unkindness or cruelty. As soon as one makes the step of depersonalizing or dehumanizing another person or group, making them some other kind, the bond of shared humanity is broken and the resulting unkindness just contributes to what’s wrong in the world.

Paradoxically, a career in Psychiatry exposed me to a lot of what’s dark in the world, particularly in the public sector – criminals and worse. But that exposure in fact strengthened my belief that there was really no such thing as evil – at least as an intrinsic quality. There were just a lot of people who were pretty sick or deluded, usually from being treated unkindly in the world.