The Strength of Kindness

The viciousness, vitriol, blatant hatred, unlimited personal attacks, the disdain for the common ground of fact, the our side is always right, fight to the death mentality; the aggressive selfishness and psychotic self-righteousness, that are thrust upon us through all forms of media, sometimes seem to fill the world.  A melancholy plea in the form of a bumper sticker: Make America Kind Again.

One of those feeling overwhelmed was journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, who referred to our reality as one in which "politeness and civility and manners were facing an extinction event in this country."  She used that phrase at the beginning of her recent profile of actor Tom Hanks in the New York Times.

Hanks is starring in the forthcoming film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, playing the famed Mr. Rogers.  According to accounts, the story is about a troubled journalist who is transformed for the better by encounters with Fred Rogers when he is assigned to write about him.  This Times article is not too subtly also the story of how an assignment to write about Tom Hanks influenced its writer for the better.

Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers

This journalist struggles with problem of writing about a nice guy playing the paradigmatic nice guy of our times: how can she keep the reader's attention without exposing the subject's malevolence, or at least tragedies?

" So Tom Hanks is as nice as you think he is and exactly what you hope him to be, which is great unless you are someone trying to tell a good story about him, with elements like an arc and narrative tension. “Saintly Actor Playing Saintly Public Television Children’s Host Mister Rogers Is Saintly” is not a great story. But what am I supposed to do?"

This of course is one key to why we read and see so much about awful people: the media rules assume we'll be interested only in them.  They demand attention.  Now certain people have learned to benefit from this.  It's the attention reality, and they are gaming the system--and seemingly winning.  (That stuff about "arc" and "narrative tension" are also part of the problem; if malevolence was the only way to tell successful stories, Tom Hanks' movies would not have done so spectacularly well, and he would not be among the most admired actors in the world.)

The journalist in the Mr. Rogers movie is based on a real journalist, and something like this story actually happened.  Rogers gave this journalist his own principles of journalism:  "1. Journalists are human beings not stenographers, human beings not automatons. 2. Point out injustice when you have to. 3. Point out beauty when you can. 4. Be aware of celebrating the wonders of creation."

Brodesser-Akner's article proceeds for awhile as many magazine pieces do, that is as an objective account with a personal edge.  But at a certain point (perhaps given permission by Mr. Rogers to not just be a stenographer) she offers more first person observations about her own life, as her interviews with Hanks become dialogues.  At one point she expresses distress over parenting issues, and Hanks engages with her so directly that she ends up in tears.

When Hanks describes the kinds of roles and stories that attract him (he especially likes playing real people with real motivations, who are complicated in realistic ways) and apparently professes a "belief in humankind, that we can’t all be that bad."

"I laughed out loud. He looked at me again and waited. It’s just all been so dark lately, I told him. It feels like the world has been engulfed in a chronic-seeming grimness, and it was beginning to feel like it was no longer an aberration but the new reality. I told him I remembered that in 2015 we’d make jokes on social media about what a cursed year it was. But it got worse and so on until now, here we were, a journalist crying in a conference room in Santa Fe."

Hanks quotes novelist Kim Stanley Robinson, to the effect that "history is a record of humanity trying to get a grip.”  He recalls "this level of vitriol and excitement" in the 1990s in the "Monica Lewinsky era."   "And we thought, oh, that’s about as big and as insane as it’s going to get. And then along comes something equally big and insane."

Then Hanks tells her about a trip he took with his youngest son on the Los Angeles light rail (obscure even in Los Angeles), how efficient it was, and how pleasant.  Not everything is awful.

In trying to profile Hanks, she spoke with many people who had worked with him, and they all related stories of his kindness, curiosity and decency.  She then quotes the actual author of the Fred Rogers profile that inspired the movie."...he went into the Mister Rogers story looking for who Fred was but came out knowing only what he did. He stared at all his reporting for a long time before he realized that the doing is actually the thing we should be paying attention to. “I don’t know if Fred was the mask or the mask was Fred,” he said. “But in the end does it even matter?”

Life is what you do, especially what you do everyday.  It is the expression of the world you believe in.

Towards the end of her piece, she writes: "I am too old for Mister Rogers. My children are too old for Mister Rogers, too. So instead I showed them “Splash,” then “Forrest Gump,” then “Big,” then “A League of Their Own.” I showed them “That Thing You Do!” and parts of “Cast Away.” I told them about the man who heard I wasn’t feeling well and adjusted his schedule for me [Hanks]. I told them that it doesn’t matter why you do nice things; all that matters is that you do them. And one day, something changed..."

A recent article by BBC News about the UCLA Bedari Kindness Institute quotes President Obama in his eulogy for Civil Rights leader and veteran Member of Congress Elijah Cummings: "Being a strong man includes being kind. There's nothing weak about kindness and compassion," he said. "There's nothing weak about looking out for others. You're not a sucker to have integrity and to treat others with respect."

Though it is often reflexive and "normal," kindness in the end takes strength.  It requires at least some effort, and the stubborn commitment to it, in the face of everything that fosters despair.

(The article also mentions talk show host Ellen DeGeneres telling her audience to be kind to each other.  If she does this regularly on her show, she won't be the first. I remember as a child in the 1950s watching the Garry Moore show every afternoon, and I knew his sign-off by heart:"Be kind to each other, will you?  And goodbye out there!"  That was a powerful thing for a kid to see.)

This article also assumes that it must defensively justify covering something called a Kindness Institute, as the researchers at the Institute must justify themselves.  The article focuses on the health benefits of kindness, so suddenly we can justify being kind for a selfish reason.  Perhaps someday they'll find that kind people actually make more money, and the Institute will really justify itself.

Why is it such a secret that kindness is its own reward?  Media and everyone else assume that winning makes you feel good, even if you destroy others in the process.  But committing an act of kindness also makes you feel good, as does anything on the continuum from love to courtesy and civility (which are versions of institutionalized kindness.)  As does experiencing beauty, which in human exchange is often related.

I've recently returned from a two-week trip 3,000 miles East and back. In airports and on airplanes, on city streets and towns (including in the real Mr. Roger's neighborhood where he grew up in Latrobe, PA),  I experienced kindness and courtesy all along the way, as well as friendship and familial love.  These things still exist.  They may exist in the same proportion they always did, or perhaps even to a greater degree.  It may be that only that the malevolence is louder and less restrained.  It is probably more obviously powerful in high places than ever before in American history, but certainly not in world history, or even in the world today.

This will be part of the fundamental test of the future.  Will decency prevail? Human society cannot thrive or even survive unless it does.  But even this perhaps misses the point.  These behaviors are essential to a cooperative, peaceful and productive society, but they are first of all personal commitments.  We are each responsible for our own actions. Kindness, courtesy, civility, generosity are expressed in action. This is how we communicate what we believe in, what we care about.  It's how we live.