Kindness

Reunion

I don’t understand racism.

I mean, I do understand it. Unconscious bias is unavoidable. Fears and resentments are part of the human feature set too. Acting cautiously when faced with something unfamiliar has helped humanity survive for thousands of years. So I understand a little distance when getting a first look at someone who seems a lot different than we are.

But to then judge someone on that difference makes me more than a little uncomfortable, and to condemn them as inferior or unworthy because of it seems cruel. Plus just morally wrong. Content of character and all that. I haven’t met anyone new who didn’t have more and more in common with me the longer we talked. I believe we all have the same right to walk this earth in our own ways (provided, of course, that our own ways don’t hurt someone else). And it’s incredibly arrogant to think that we alone see the truth of the universe. Talk about hubris.

What I don’t understand is why we don’t treat the world in general and the United States in particular as a big family reunion. Think of a potluck with barbecue and mole and pumpkin curry and flatbread and honey walnut prawns and seviche and falafel and pelmeni and injera and kugel and raclette. Plus baked ziti. Lots of baked ziti.

We could have massive soccer and softball games and the world’s largest three-legged race. We will need a few billion neon t-shirts though.

I’m an introvert, but I’d go to that.

I say reunion because we all split up thousands of years ago. As we left behind our great-grandparents to the nth power back in Africa, some of us went north and some went east. Some didn’t go anywhere and stayed put. And eventually we populated the world. And as we did so, we discovered how to survive in different places. We adapted to our environments. But at our core we remained largely as we had been. Including skeptical of new people.

So whether our particular ancestors walked across the land bridge or came by boat – forcibly or not – or migrated here after settling down somewhere else for a while, we all ended up back together here in this land where we are all immigrants. We aren’t really new people, just people long separated.

So let’s have the serious discussion about how many new people our community can successfully integrate each year. I am an includer by nature, but the resource limits that constrain us are real. So we will have to prioritize among the people who want to join us. And some of those need to be people fleeing dangerous places, because we don’t want to be complete assholes.

Let’s also not lose sight of the selfish need to bring in immigrants to make up the shortfall of new people we aren’t producing ourselves.

I really hope I get to be a grandfather. I remember my father’s reaction when my elder daughter, his first grandchild, was born. The joy. The affirmation. The complete, total satisfaction. He said as he reflected that he needed nothing else from this life.

I’d like to feel that way.

But whereas my parents have nine grandchildren I will likely have two. At best. If you’re a boomer like me (or even a Gen Xer like my brother), our kids aren’t having kids. And if you’re younger, you’re not having enough kids to sustain our community. Which is fine – I believe first in maximum agency, so you do you and I’ll do me, and together we’ll adjust. And part of that adjustment, at least for all of us concerned about having a healthy community, is to find ways to provide work and care and goods and services to all of our members,. And if we don’t make our own people to help with all that, then we need to import them.

But let’s not pollute the important discussion about who can join us and when they can come with xenophobic thoughts of worth. We are all worthy. And anyone who hints that we aren’t is either bigoted, ignorant, or cynically serving themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

And in the meantime, who wants to organize this amazing and wonderful family reunion?

Grace

Like many other things, grace is much harder in real life than in the abstract. I was reminded again during my recent flight from San Francisco to Denver.

I noticed the large young man in the gate area waiting to board. He was tall, wide, and he wore a hockey jersey, but what really distinguished him was his flouting of social norms. He listened to hip-hop music on his phone without earphones – he wasn’t blaring it, but I could still hear it clearly. He used the phone to speak to his mother, answering her questions in the annoyed, impatient tone that all young people use with their parents. He told her in great detail about his trip to the airport and his struggles getting through TSA. His voice was loud, penetrating, impossible to tune out.

As I lined up to board the flight he passed completely from my attention. I settled into my window seat near the back of the plane, then closed my eyes and enjoyed the respite between my rush to the airport and the flight to come. I would have forgotten him had that insistent voice not trashed my calm as he stood in the aisle, asking someone which seat was his, window or aisle.

It was the window seat. And it was directly behind mine.

My seat felt like a buoy on the ocean as he pushed, pulled, and jostled while squeezing himself into his seat. Oblivious to the people around him, he began talking loudly to the unfortunate man sitting next to him, detailing his trip to the airport and all the things he had to manage in preparation for the flight. Bad enough the middle seat, but what is worth this extra penance?

Our man spoke about his preference for window seats. He asked his seatmate to hold his coffee while he rummaged through his backpack for food. And when the seatmate, realizing his very bad luck, feigned sleep, our oblivious traveler got on his phone and called a friend.

The conversation – or at least the half of it that I overheard (truthfully, it was more like 80 percent, because our guy dominated it) – could not have been more banal. It covered his TSA experience again, his travel plans for the day including flight times and layovers down to the minute, his recipe for carnitas, and his delight in getting frozen shrimp for less than $8 per pound thanks to the buy-one-get-one-free promotion at the grocery store. The conversation, all at volume, lasted at least 20 minutes. All the while he fidgeted, bouncing me around in my seat. In short, I could not ignore him, and I couldn’t concentrate enough to do anything but stew in my own aggravation.

When he finally ended his phone call, he still could not sit still. So I continued to fume, piqued that my calm had been disrupted, that the bubble I cast around myself when I venture into the world had been pierced.

And then I heard it. A soft grunt. Almost a hum. Then another. And another. Every twenty seconds or so. Like clockwork.

The guy I consigned to inconsiderate jerkhood has a compulsion. I don’t know the condition – autism, Tourette Syndrome, some other neurological issue – but I realized that he couldn’t control the internal energy he generated. He was disrupting me, not out of malice, not out of apathy, but out of need. It’s just how he’s wired.

Which reminded me that whenever we enter the public sphere we will encounter people different from us. People with different behaviors, different backgrounds, different perspectives. Usually those differences are minute, hardly noticeable, but sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes, like on my flight, they are large and prominent. They can’t be ignored. And that’s when we feel uncomfortable.

We won’t always be comfortable in the public sphere. But, aside from personal safety, we don’t have a right to demand that others conform to our expectations when we’re sharing public spaces. We all have a right to be ourselves, and while we owe each other safety we don’t owe each other comfort.

Sometimes we must endure discomfort, so that we can all live in freedom. Freedom to share what’s communally ours, even if we’re not wired to notice other people’s cues. And so while my incredibly disruptive travel companion banged my seat all the way to Denver, I tried to move past my annoyance and find grace.

I wish I’d been able to do it without the reminder, but perhaps I’ve become complacent. I am, after all, an older, affluent white dude, which puts me atop most social orders. I am the norm, or at least the model around which we’ve organized our social norms. So forgive my short-sightedness when I’m inconvenienced.

I don’t begrudge the test. I just wish I had passed without the help.

Divorce, Writ Large

My wife and I are midway through a so-far amicable divorce.

(I add “so far” only to keep from jinxing us – I am a mite superstitious, and I fully expect we’ll finish it as friends, but, well, you know. . . .)

We are much – much – better as friends than spouses. We disappoint each other tremendously as spouses, but when we lower our expectations to those of friends we fit well.

While our personal situation involves just two, I think it’s analogous to our larger community. Our country – well, our world to be honest – has split into two camps, and there’s virtually no common ground between them. Call them Red and Blue, Progressive and Conservative, Flyover and Coastal, Snowflakes and Rednecks, but we have highly divergent views on how we want to live. And we’re both trying to force our choices on the other.

So I think our no-longer United States of America needs a similar remedy to the one my wife and I chose: an amicable divorce.

As sad and disruptive as a divorce is, it’s still better than burning down the house. And that’s where we’re headed if we continue to try to force half of our community to accept policies, behaviors, spending priorities that are antithetical to their beliefs. The majority – or even a significant minority – will not accept being shut out of communal decisions. When the majority – or even a significant minority – is repeatedly denied even partial satisfaction, they will respond. And when all peaceful avenues to change are blocked, violence follows. The majority – or even a significant minority – will take action, and if violence is the only action that remains, then that’s the path it will choose.

We can circumvent all that destruction though. When people have fundamentally different views on how to live they need to let each other go instead of trying to get the other to knuckle under. Respect each other’s choices and let them live the lives the want to live. Be generous, be gracious, be true to yourself, allow others to be true to themselves.

National divorce will be messy.

We’ll need to revamp all kinds of institutions and create policy from scratch. But the world has many roadmaps to separating nations. Sudan and South Sudan. Yugoslavia. Czechoslovakia. We’ll need to discuss alimony – as economies separate some have more promise than others, and it’s fair to compensate the disadvantaged partner. We’ll need to decide geography – what land corresponds to which country. And I suppose we’ll have to decide how to handle the few territories we have too, though maybe we should let the people in Puerto Rico, Samoa, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands decide where they want to go.

But the alternative is messier. Years of acrimony and recriminations that detract from our quality of life. Energy and resources wasted on trying to change minds and, when that fails (as it surely will), forcing the other to submit.

We don’t need to do that. Separation can be traumatic. It can be vicious. Or it can be kind.

I’m a believer in kindness.

Divorce

My wife and I are divorcing.

We’ve been married more than 32 years. There’s no precipitating event. No outburst. No affair. No abuse. No addictions.

So why are we divorcing?

I don’t think we’ve ever been well-suited for each other. She wears her heart on her sleeve, sharing her thoughts and feelings broadly. I am very private. She tests ideas out loud, working through her thought processes verbally. When I speak, I’ve already decided. She seeks validation, and I am parsimonious with feedback. She lives spontaneously, changing her mind frequently. I make a plan and stick to it.

Early in our marriage we invested the time to resolve our conflicts and differences. And then, as time passed, we stopped trying. Cracks developed. And, unresolved, the cracks widened into fissures, the fissures into gaps, the gaps into chasms. Dawn made more of an effort than I did to fix what was happening in our marriage, but I didn’t have the emotional awareness to deal with our problems. Or the will to find it.

And so we find ourselves after 32 years not strangers but friends.

But not more than friends either. We are divorcing amicably, as you’d expect of friends, even friends who share children.

We have wounds. We don’t trust each other with our emotional well-being. I have hurt her by rejecting her (her version); she has hurt me by not following through on commitments (my version). Both have merit. Neither is the full story. As with most things between married couples.

In spite of our wounds, we don’t harbor ill will. Or at least not enough of it to complicate our dissolution. In fact, because of lower expectations with the transition from spouses to friends our relationship has been smoother. I hope it continues. I expect that we will remain friends, though it will likely be at a distance, at least until grandchildren pull us back into the same orbit. Among our differences are weather and social preferences: she likes active social scenes and cooler weather, while my ideals are warmer temperatures and few but meaningful interactions with others. Funnily enough, I’m likely to head to colder climes while she makes a go of it in the hot valleys of northern California.

Our daughters are taking the split well. We don’t blame each other, so they don’t either. And they do love us both after all. Damaging our relationships with our daughters is a worst-case scenario, and we are thankful that at least we made a very effective parenting team.

We’ve set intentions to treat each other both kindly and fairly, and we are walking that path. We have a long distance yet to go, and there are potential stressors related to our financial situations that could still roil the waters. We have engaged professionals to help us untangle our emotional wounds, handle the legal process, and counsel us on finances, so I hope that they can help us navigate those potential pitfalls (to mix a lot of metaphors!).

In our latest session, our divorce therapist asked us how we were feeling about our divorce and to what we were saying goodbye as we split. Dawn feels the loss keenly, though she fully believes it’s the preferrable outcome. I am not sad or grief-stricken but rather optimistic that we can have a more emotionally satisfying relationship once we say goodbye to the stress and tension that marked a lot of our married interactions.

Time will, of course, tell the tale. As it always does.

But I am hopeful.

The world is a stressful place these days.

Both our agreements and our disagreements feel heightened, packed with more emotion. It doesn’t seem to me that we differentiate or prioritize our feelings now. We expect – or at least demand – complete fealty to all of our values or we sever ties, usually with some choice words to hasten the split. We even approach discussions on significant issues expecting confrontations, so it’s no small wonder that they turn belligerent and end unsatisfyingly. You’re either with me or against me, and not just on one or two important issues but on everything that matters to me. And if you’re against me, then pound sand, because I’m not just the aggrieved party, I’m completely right. Which means not only are you wrong, you’re an a-hole for not recognizing it.

But we’re not happy about it either. Confrontations fester in our minds, we plot to be better prepared the next time the topic comes up, we scheme to create another “discussion” so we can use our newly-minted insights and comebacks. Our minds are being consumed with conflict. And it’s wearing me out.

There is a remedy though. And it’s simple. Though, admittedly, not easy.

Kindness.

Just like your parents taught you once upon a time. Kindness begins with offering others – especially those who don’t see things the same way we do – the benefit of the doubt. We seem to be rather short on doubt any more, but work with me.

I believe two things about people: 1) they are consumed with their own lives and thoughts and feelings – just as I am self-absorbed, no one else is really thinking about me much at all; and 2) they don’t want to hurt me any more than I want to hurt them (which is not at all). As I consider other people and their actions, it would be best if I didn’t judge them at all. That’s unlikely at best though, so remembering these 2 things help me find kindness. (When I remember, that is.)

The ones who vex me are consumed with their own lives, and their experiences and knowledge and assumptions have led them to believe what I find anathematic. I should reach out to understand that perspective. And they didn’t choose their stand to oppose me. They weren’t thinking about me at all, so our disagreements aren’t personal rejections. Emotions don’t need to be part of the discussion if we’re aiming for understanding rather than consensus.

I don’t know if we can disentangle ourselves enough to make these interactions less stressful. But I think we’d all feel better if we did. And so I must try.