It wasn’t too deep into the night the other night, when there emerged a refrain, one that perked up my ears, made me sit firm in my armchair. An obsolescence seemed to be stirring.
“Kindness was on the ballot.” (Dr. Amy Acton, governor-elect Ohio)
“It’s also been a message of kindness.” (Jeff Zeleny, CNN)
“She said kindness was on the ballot.” (Lauren Fox, Congressional correspondent, CNN)
Kindness (n.) “having or exhibiting a nature that is gentle, considerate, and inclined to benevolent or beneficent actions.” (Webster’s Dictionary of Synonyms, First Edition)
It’s a quest that traces across the millennia, certainly, and across civilizations. I’d argue it’s hard-baked into DNA, and not just that of us humans. In American history, it cropped up as a plain stake in the political road back in 2016, when Barack Obama put it squarely: “Tolerance is on the ballot. Courtesy is on the ballot. Honesty is on the ballot. Equality is on the ballot. Kindness is on the ballot. All the progress we made in the last eight years is on the ballot,” the then-President said in a fiery campaign rally in Cleveland that October. “Democracy itself is on the ballot right now.” It went down in defeat that year.
But, again and again the other night, I heard it, this staking a claim for kindness, and sweeter words I find hard to imagine.
What’s crushed me most in these past dark years, these soulless-seeming years, is the cruelty, the mockery, the divisiveness so stark and so deep we all had to tiptoe around our holiday tables. God forbid we mention our revulsion while passing the cranberry sauce. It had all bled so far beyond politics, it was the very marrow of morality that felt gutted.
Lives were being routed. Whole populations demonized. Terror, in some corners of America, rose to a palpable buzz—and not just there in the shadows.
It wasn’t simply kindness we seemed to be lacking, we’d morphed into a nation of monsters. And all by our lonesome we just couldn’t stop it, though little by little we tried.
I know good people who’d turned a blind eye to it, excused it away sometimes, acknowledged its awfulness other times, but refused to budge from their broader defense of the perpetrator. And it got mighty hard around here to have a true conversation. I found myself lost in a rhetorical cul-de-sac, knowing I could go round and round without exit or headway. Or I could shut up and slink away. Maybe too often I slunk away.
Now it seems maybe I wasn’t alone. Maybe most of us weren’t. A good 124.3 million of us heaved ourselves out of our La-Z-Boys, and shuffled off to the polls. We marked our boxes and made our voice known.
Kindness was on the ballot.
We voted for kindness. And tolerance. And common courtesy, the sort most often played out in quotidian spaces: the checkout line, the hospital waiting room, the booths at the farmers’ markets.
We voted for honesty. For the right to dream the American Dream.
I voted against graft, and the lining of too-deep pockets. I voted against the gutting of the CDC. I sure as hell voted against the gutting of the National Institutes of Health, where maybe some day someone will find a cure for the cancer that has swirled through my lungs. How dare they claim that research redundant.
I voted against the betrayal of Ukraine. And the cockamamie, cruel notion that Gaza some day could be a Riviera on the Red Sea.
I voted against ICE squads rampaging through the leafy streets of unassuming towns, where hard-working souls were raking up leaves, clearing gutters, pounding shingles onto leaky roofs. I voted against those squads wreaking terror in the bowels of restaurant dishwashing rooms, and school pick-up lines, and the parking lots of big-box stores where gaggles of men, and sometimes mere children, wait for a chance at a paltry day’s wage.
And I sure as hell voted against the sickening lies that Haitians were eating cats and dogs, and the audacity of calling Somalis “garbage.”
In sum: I voted against avarice and self-dealing and sycophancy, and the betrayal of all human decencies.
Plainly, I knew kindness was on the ballot. And in the loudest, wordless voice we Americans claim as our own, I picked up my black-ink pen and I pushed hard as I could as I filled in the bubble next to the names of those who would push the kindness agenda.
It’s been a whole long while since I’ve wiped away tears of relief, of something that felt like resurrection, like rising from the dead, as election projections flashed on the screen. But I wept those tears the other night.
Kindness was on the ballot.
And it won.
Resoundingly.
(I didn’t mean for this to get political, really, I meant to write a meditation on kindness, on those barely noticeable stitches that embroider a day, then a month, then a lifetime. But I surrendered to those pent-up waves of revulsion, the ones that have had me despondent over these past few years, wondering how our moral core had been vaporized, aghast at the insanity that sometimes seemed unstoppable. I did not recognize the America we’d become in the eyes of the world, and I found myself wanting to climb to a podium or race to the top of the Capitol steps and shout my profoundest apologies to all those we’d sinned against. I had a grandmother who threatened to wash our mouths out with soap if we said anything hurtful or awful. Had she lived to witness this era, oh, the soaps she would have sudsed.)
I’m going to close this out with a few lines excerpted from one of the acceptance speeches (from the other night. Doesn’t matter what political stripes this speaker wears. What the speaker says, though, is worth listening to. No matter our stripes:
“My granddad was a Baptist preacher in South Texas, and when I was little, he told me that we follow a barefoot rabbi who gave us two commandments, love God and love neighbor, because there is no love of God without love of neighbor.
“Every single person bears the image of the sacred. Every single person is holy, not just my neighbor who looks like me, not just my neighbor who prays like me, not just my neighbor who votes like me. I am called to love all of my neighbors the way I love myself.”
The speaker went on, and I’ll pick it up here:
“I think it’s safe to say that we are tired of being pitted against each other. We are tired of being told to hate each other.
“It has been 10 years of this kind of politics, politics as blood sport, politics as trolling and owning, politics as professional wrestling.
“It tears families apart. It ends friendships and it leaves us all feeling terrible all the time. People across the political spectrum are hungry for a different kind of politics. Not a politics of hate, not a politics of fear, not a politics of division, but a politics of love.
“My faith teaches me that love is the strongest force in the universe. Love is not passive. Love is not neutral. Love is not weak. Love requires that we stand between the bullies and the bullied. Love requires that we look evil in the eye and not blink. That kind of love has always been a threat to the powers that be. That kind of love is revolutionary. That kind of love is creative.”
I voted for that kind of love. One of its names is kindness. Pure and simple kindness.
Tell a story of kindness you witnessed this week.
p.s. If you’re inclined to listen to the whole of the speech from which I plucked a few passages, you can find it right here, the words of the seminarian-turned-senator, James Talarico.
Millions of us went searching for the soul of the nation at the ballot box and found it in our own votes! Thank Barbara M 💙