Thierry Sagnier's Blog, page 9

Joyless and Loveless

By Elayne Griffin Baker

There’s no literature or poetry in the White House. No music. No Kennedy Center award celebrations. There are no pets in this White House. No loyal man’s best friend. No Socks the family cat. No kids’ science fairs. No times when this president takes off his blue suit-red tie uniform and becomes human, except when he puts on his white shirt-khaki pants uniform and hides from Americans to play golf. There are no images of the first family enjoying themselves together in a moment of relaxation. No Obamas on the beach in Hawaii moments, or Bushes fishing in Kennebunkport, no Reagans on horseback, no Kennedys playing touch football on the Cape.

I was thinking the other day of the summer when George H couldn’t catch a fish and all the grandkids made signs and counted the fish-less days. And somehow, even if you didn’t even like GHB, you got caught up in the joy of a family that loved each other and had fun. Where did that country go? Where did all of the fun and joy and expressions of love and happiness go?

We used to be a country that did the ice bucket challenge and raised millions for charity. We used to have a president that calmed and soothed the nation instead dividing it. And a First Lady that planted a garden instead of ripping one out. We are rudderless and joyless. We have lost the cultural aspects of society that make America great. We have lost our mojo, our fun, our happiness. The cheering on of others. Gone. The shared experiences of humanity that makes it all worth it. Gone. The challenges AND the triumphs that we shared and celebrated. The unique can-do spirit Americans have always been known for. Gone. We have lost so much in so short a time.

Vote Democratic all the way down the ballot on November 3rd.

Sssscammm

Hello! Kindly advise if your company has the license or capability to execute a mutil (sic) million contract supply project for the Government of Algeria. kindly furnish me your response. Thank you and treat very urgent. Looking forward to an early response. Ali Hassan. (Text of an email received twice in four minutes.)
Ooh! Ooh! Me! I want the mutil million contract with the Government of Algeria. They speak French n Algeria! I’ll be a natural there!.
You have exceeded limit of your email account, Helpdesk requires your quick regeneration survey to create space. Click link below to upgrade:
http://aminos.by/wp-admin/js/01/. You need to upgrade for new space otherwise you will not be able to send or receive message.
Helpdesk Support. (Text of an email received at least once a day for the past month.)
Oh no! Here’s my password and social security number! Please don’t turn my email off!
It’s a sad state of affairs when the scam artists get so lazy they can’t come up with anything original. I want to tell Ali Hassan that I now understand why his country is in such a sad state. If Ali is the best swindler Algeria has to offer, there’s little hope for the country.
Yesterday I got a Facebook friend request from Anna Downs, a pretty young American stuck in Ghana because of Covid-19. Anna needed me to vouch for her, which I could do with my bank routing number. If I could lend her enough to buy an airline ticket to Canada, her parents, who owned 3M, would reimburse me in full and, to show their undying gratitude, also bestow upon me many shares of highly valuable 3M stocks. This sounded like a win/win deal, but when I tried to reach Anna, her Facebook page had vanished.
Even more promising was a message from a couple of months ago from Irina L, who sent along a photo of herself in a very skimpy outfit. Irina was 22 years old and, to put it succinctly, comely and possibly surgically enhanced. She was writing from her Latvian village because my friend Joe (everyone has a friend named Joe) had given her my name and email address. My friend Joe thought I was just the man to help Irina out of a bind.
Irina, it seems, had done all that was necessary to come to America. Her papers were in order, and she’d purchased a one-way airline ticket to get to New York. But the situation in her country had gone from bad to worse, and now the airlines wanted another $500. Could I help?
I wrote back to Irina asking for more info. What kind of visa did she have? Tourist, student? Was she asking for refugee status? Irina said she had a green card visa—something I wasn’t familiar with—that would enable her to apply for immigrant status shortly after her arrival in the US. And then I noticed Irina’s mail seemed to be coming from an NGA IP address. Hmmm. How had Irina traveled so quickly from Latvia to Nigeria? Was it possible that Irina was actually a Nigerian scammer? No, really? How disappointing.
I wrote Irina an accusatory email, basically telling her/him to get stuffed, although I used a different word.
Irina’s offended response the next morning read: Dear Thierry, Please stop all commubinicating (sic) with me. You are not a very nice man.
I’m crushed.

Friends

This is for my friends. They have listened to me bitch, whine, moan, and make myself otherwise ridiculously pitiable (or perhaps pitiful) over the last decade as my health took a nosedive and my perception of mortality sharpened.
Thank you.
I have very few friends and too many acquaintances. The latter take me to lunch once and tell me about their own health issues, or those of their late Aunt Pearl, a saintly woman who underwent the torments of hell without once complaining. I take this to mean that in their company, benign conversation is far preferable to talk of woes and fears, and so wax euphoric about the kale salad and baked artichoke hearts on the menu.
My friends, on the other hand, have listened, often with pursed lips and furrowed brows. They have not given me spurious advice (“Have you seen a doctor?” asked one acquaintance), or suggested I travel to Mexico to see the holistic shaman who successfully treated the cousin of their secretary’s mother. They have encouraged me to have two half-pound Big Bites with chili from 7/11 following surgery, if this was my wish, then did not utter a word of counsel after I related that this post-operation meal had not in the least agreed with me.
One drove me a dozen times to and from surgery, and gently humored me when I came out of it completely loopy and stoned. He spoke with the doctor after the operation and endured being thought of as my aging gay partner. He has filled my prescriptions, driven me home, and then called later in the evening to make sure all was well.
My friends often don’t say anything at all about my health unless I bring the subject up. Then they ask intelligent questions and suggest practical solutions. They don’t get annoyed when I tell them I really don’t like Zoom, or any other remote-viewing mechanism. They stay in touch even if Covid-19 has made person-to-person encounters difficult. There is little to be gained by recounting the sorry tales of one’s declining years, yet when I do, my friends endure my perorations.
Personally, I think there’s nothing more boring than listening to someone else’s health-related stories. Yes, there are funny ones, like the surgeon who, after my third bladder cancer operation, called me and said, “Hello Mabel! How’s your ankle?”, and there are horrible ones, like the nurse who accidentally sent me a letter suggesting I quickly get my affairs in order as I had just a few weeks to live. I tell my friends the same cancer jokes several times and they always laugh. I was once asked by a vague acquaintance what sort of cancer I would prefer to have. I answered, “Ovarian.” My friends still find this hilarious.
So this is for my friends. You know who you are and I love you all.

A Celestial Error

There must be some mistake. This is not supposed to happen to me. Maybe to the guy without a mask in the elevator. Maybe to the nasty lady in the front office of my apartment complex. She had my car towed. Twice. Maybe even to you, but not to me.
If it did happen to you, I would be full of compassion and sincerity; I’m good at that. I would check up with you by email and bring food over to your house, do your laundry and run your errands if you could not. I’m good at that, too.
But me? Me should not have to go through a fairly horrifying six-hour surgical procedure that will excise my bladder and prostate and other bits and pieces and rearrange my innards.
After a longish talk with my doctor, I found out the procedure has a two percent mortality rate, i.e., I croak on the table, which would be uncool but possibly painless. There’s a much higher chance of complications ranging from infection or puncturing the large intestine to catching Covid-19 at the hospital. There are ED issues which should not matter but do. I won’t be able to carry or lift heavy stuff for a couple of months, and a hopefully complete recuperation might take up to a year.
So it’s all greatly worrisome. I’m concerned with the painkillers I’ll be given. I had run-ins with drugs some decades ago and I know how easy it is to let that stuff get the better of you. I also know from recent experience that it takes a lot of drugs to make me truly comatose. On two occasions in the past, I’ve woken up during surgery. And then there’s the notion of having what is essentially a plastic faucet coming out of my guts. That’s just weird. What if it leaks? That would look really stupid.
Here’s an interesting bit. Within hours after writing my cancer blog a week ago, I began receiving ads on Facebook for the following:
1. Funeral insurance
2. Life insurance
3. Wheelchairs
4. Flomentum, a prostate health supplement
5. The Mayo Clinic

There were also announcements that I might benefit from the litigation against the Boy Scouts but I’m not sure if that was related.
What it comes down to is that I’m getting cold feet. This is one of those situations that’s scary either way—do something and hurt a lot; do nothing and probably die.
Like I said. This shouldn’t be happening to me.

Plots of Life

There are times when I feel opaque, almost transparent. All emotions I have had that could be expanded have been spent, for good or for ill, and whatever I believe I am capable of teaching has been taught ad nauseam. Maybe it’s a function of age, this strange repetition of feelings, events, history, passions and sensations. The core of me says everything I listen to has been said too many times before, and even in Western music, there are only 12 notes, and every possible arrangement has been composed, hummed and played. I finally understand the full meaning of Ecclesiastes 1:9, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Obviously, even Shakespeare was willing to rehash these older feelings, (oh how I hate to quote Shakespeare… So déclassé) in Sonnet 59, when he wrote:
If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burden of a former child.
This sense of not-quite-déjà-vu is insidious. If everything has been done, thought, written and said, then what’s the point? Is life really a simple replay of all that’s already been accomplished?
If life is stranger than fiction, and fiction is too often representative of life, then the truth of it all might be found only in the footnotes, and lets be honest, who among us has time for footnotes, prologues, epilogues or addenda? Most of us read pages diagonally, getting the gist rather than the details. We want the meat and potatoes, not the parsley lining the main course. In fact, we get sort of impatient if the heart of the matter is obscured by the writer’s garnish. And that’s OK, for the most part. After all, no less an authority than Christopher Booker, the British founder of the magazine Private Eye, believes all literature—and here I would add all life—hinges on a few simple plot lines.
The first is Overcoming the Monster. From Beowulf to modern horror novels, we strive to defeat something bigger and more evil than ourselves.
The second story line is Rags to Riches, where we better ourselves along accepted social lines.
Then we might go on to plot number three, The Quest, or the search for meaning which will almost certainly involve plot line four, The Voyage and Return. All this may bear traces of both or either Comedy and Tragedy and inevitably as spring follows winter, leads to Rebirth, or perhaps salvation. In more recent times and bowing to changes in modern literature, Booker added two more entries, Rebellion (think 1984. Come to think of it, consider now) and Mystery.
From my standpoint, plot lines one through seven perfectly exemplify modern lives. Some of us will live at least two of them, and many of us will exist and struggle through three or more. They repeat themselves, though wearing different costumes and playing different roles. Death, romance, work, play, family and friends, even faith, are cyclical. We pretend to see newness where there is none because doing otherwise will take the wind out of any ship’s sails.
Hmmm. I have no more deep thoughts today, nor even shallow ones, and it’s time for the brown rice and egg whites.
But give this some thought: out of the seven plots, which ones are yours?

A Crime

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Twelve-and-a-half years ago, not far from where I live in Northern Virginia, a young woman was brutally murdered by a drug- and alcohol- addicted former felon named Mark E. Lawlor. Lawlor at the time was a leasing agent for the building complex where the young woman lived. He attacked 29-year-old Genevieve Orange with a claw hammer, struck her head 30 times as she lay napping on her couch, then raped her as she was dying. Both Lawlor and Orange, should you be curious, are/were white.
The victim’s and assailant’s backgrounds, though, could not have been more different. Orange was raised near Roanoke by a stable family that included a mother and father as well as sets of grandparents, all of whom doted on her. She was a good student, and after graduating from Virginia Tech, came to Washington to find a job. She was hired by the Futures Industry Association and rented a studio apartment in the Virginia suburbs.
Lawlor, 45, was living in a nearby transitional facility after serving five years in prison for abducting a former girlfriend. He violated his probation twice, and both times was re-incarcerated. At the time of the murder, Lawlor, according to his attorney, “had so much crack in him he was unable to form the specific intent to kill Ms. Orange.” In other words, he was so was high on crack that he couldn’t control himself.
Lawlor’s background was one of violence and rejection. He was born to a mother who often beat him and a father who regularly molested and raped Lawlor’s sister. The family led an isolated existence and there were no other relatives around. Lawlor was raped at age 13 by a friend he had made at camp. A year later, a neighbor also molested him. He was thrown out of his home at 16 by his shotgun-wielding father who told him to never return. He had started using drugs and alcohol some time earlier and was full-fledged addict by the time he was ejected from his home. When he was 18, he and a friend stole a car. They were both drunk. Lawlor was driving and crashed the car, killing the friend. He went to prison for the first time, served his sentence and sobered up, but sobriety never stuck and he was soon using again. That’s when he abducted his former girlfriend, who told the jury during this trial that Lawlor had yanked her from her car, thrown her into his car, then driven around while threatening her. He served five years for the crime
In March 2009, Fairfax Country prosecutors obtained a capital murder indictment against Lawlor for the murder and rape of Genevieve Orange. He was found guilty and sentenced to the death penalty, which was later commuted to life without parole.
Can the extenuating circumstances of his sad and sorry life possibly excuse his behavior? Should a man with a history of mental issues and addiction be held responsible for his actions? Hurt people, it is said, hurt people, and there is no doubt as to the truth of this simple adage.
My first reaction, truthfully, was “fry the motherf*cker.” My second reaction was pretty much the same, and my third was to wonder whether Virginia taxpayers (of which I am one) should bear the approximately $160,000 annual cost of his incarceration.
I bring all this up because as the election nears, we will be regaled by Republican tales of horrible crimes similar to those of Lawlor, perpetrated by Blacks, Mexicans, immigrants, refugees, Arabs, and Latin American gang members, BLM protesters, marchers, miscreants and dissidents. Most of these crimes will have been committed against White people, we’ll be told.
A lot of these tales will be false, or blatantly exaggerated. Social media will play a huge role. If the country turns to the right, we’ll see an increase in executions.
End Note: I find it fascinating that we have a president who, though not accused of murder, has certainly been named as a rapist by several women. I doubt he’ll serve a day in prison for such white-on-white crimes. But if he does, I hope Lawlor is his cellmate.

Why Write?

I haven’t written much, lately. I did a blog on the intractability of my bladder cancer, which will require serious surgery soon, and I’ve toyed with a couple of book ideas, which are a dime a dozen. Mostly, I’ve been working with other writers on their books.
Part of my lack of productivity comes from where we are now as a nation. In today’s Washington Post, the absurd reigns. Trump Attacks Public Schools yells a headline above the fold. A man who can barely string a coherent sentence together thinks teaching youngsters about slavery and racism is wrong. It demeans the country, he says. Absurd? Yep. An Attorney General who has defiled the basic principles of American jurisprudence criticizes his Justice Department for politicizing the law. More absurdity. Just below the fold, smaller headlines tell us Feds Sought ‘Heat Ray’ for D.C. Rally. Really??? A heat ray? The powers that be wanted to use on its own citizenry a weapon deemed unfit for war.
Forest fires, hurricanes, floods, a pandemic, an upcoming election that is sure to try the sanity of voters, anti-science asses wielding weapons and encouraged to do so by the country’s leader. A president without a moral compass. In less than two years, the nation almost everyone looked up to has become a pariah state. One could write a pre-apocalyptic novel, I suppose, but when the absurd transcends reality on a daily basis, what is left to chronicle?
How does one write about overwhelming idiocy and an encouraged blindness to the truth? Most of the world has concluded that our country is going through a national Saint Vitus dance. Something we ate, perhaps, or have come to believe. We have elected a moronic criminal whose sole object has been to enrich himself, his family, and his mafia. We gape at the inanities he mouths, daily hoping that he’s reached a bottom, but he hasn’t. Yesterday’s follies overshadow today’s stupidities. Why write about that? It’s almost like criticizing the village idiot. It serves no purpose. The village idiot is who he is and will not change.
It struck me that another reason for my written silence is that I do not want to be doomsayer, even as I am persuaded we are fast heading toward catastrophe. I think we are seeing the end of the American empire, and I am saddened at how quickly our might has eroded. The American experience, once filled with strength and power, has failed. Democracy, as practiced in the US, has proven itself time and again simply does not work. It is the victim of greed, complacency, racism, and frightening ignorance paired with the hard-held view that all opinions matter (they do not).
Today, under the flag of equality, we are left with the notion that the beliefs of the clueless and ignorant are as viable as those of the wise. They are not, but we’re encouraged to think they are. That’s a recipe for tragedy.

Bye Bye Bladder

My bladder is dying. Four words, perhaps the strangest words I have ever written.
After a ten-year battle with cancer, 22 operations, and untold chemo sessions; after being scoped, scraped, sliced, lasered, and washed in BCG, a solution of tubercular sheep cells designed to attack cancer cells, my bladder, unheralded and unsexy organ, is giving up the ghost. There’s too much scar tissue, my oncologist said, and the last biopsy once again revealed a thriving colony of high-grade cancer cells. No one, to my knowledge, is doing bladder transplants, which sort of surprises me. Each year in the United States, about 56,000 men and 18,000 women get bladder cancer, and about 12,000 men and 5,000 women die from the it. I suppose the disease is not interesting enough to warrant doing transplant research.
At this point, I have three choices. I can do nothing, and the likelihood is that the cancer will spread and there will be a lot of pain. My body’s reaction to the BCG chemo makes that choice no longer viable. I can try a new suite of chemicals that has only an eighteen percent chance of success. I can have my bladder surgically removed.
The last option has its own set of complications. Excising one’s bladder is considered major surgery, with a week-long hospital stay, major discomfort for some time, and the constant threat of infection. My future will involve a permanent urostomy bag. This last part is what worries me most of all. It’s simply weird to consider walking around with a container of pee strapped to one’s body.
What concerns me more than the physical impact are the emotional and psychological ones. My father when his 60s, was operated for colon cancer and for awhile had to wear a colostomy bag. It was hell on him and the family, and it aged him prematurely. I can’t tell yet how I’ll react to the inevitability, but I fear it won’t be positively. I’ve read that once organs are removed, a likely domino effect will follow. The cancer might simply find another site to invade.
The fact is I am bone-tired of battling this noxious disease. A decade is a long time, and the tests every three months were exercises in fear and anxiety. Sometimes I came out clean and it appeared I was in remission—nine months, in 2019—but more often than not there was surgery and chemo, followed by more tests. Recuperation took increasingly long—weeks at first, months more recently. Part of me wants to throw in the towel; part of me wants to fight. It’s confusing and frankly debilitating.
When first diagnosed and confident I’d beat this, I told friends I was going to start a band and call it Bad Bladder. I never got around to doing that. In retrospect, it’s a shame.

The Hereafter

My parents died decades ago. They were good people who’d both fought in the Big One, and when they came to America, the country was still a land of welcome, wonders and innovations. They left Europe behind, abandoned the sooty streets and grey buildings of Paris to find a yellow clapboard house in the suburbs, with a yard and a driveway and an outbuilding for the garden tools and mower that my mother—being a city girl—did not know how to use until she was shown. They spent a bit more than 25 years here, became citizens who voted and appreciated what the land had to offer, and then they returned to France with what I think was a sigh of relief. Not that there was anything wrong with the States—there wasn’t—but they were French to the core and wanted to be in Paris where as newlyweds they were improbable radio stars, the main characters of the GI John et Janine show, where Janine saved the day and GI John, a not overly bright American soldier, basked in the love of his wily French wife.

We all anticipate our parents’ death, but when it comes and make orphans of us, it’s never quite what we expect. My mother died in 1992 at the American Hospital in Paris where some 46 years earlier, she’d given birth to me. My father died in the States four years later. He never fully got over his wife’s passing.

I always thought somehow one or both would send me a sign from Over There, but they never have. In fact, their total silence is almost disturbing. Almost everyone I know who has lost parents has told me that at some time they felt the parents’ presence nearby, reassuring in times of sadness or stress. Some have said the presence was almost physical; they were touched or kissed or hugged by long-gone family members and were never quite the same afterwards. Call it a spiritual experience, or a miraculous moment if you believe in such.

When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I was certain one or the other would come to advise and reassure. After all, they both went through it too—my mother died from hers, my father recovered from his—and they must have had words of wisdom ready to go. My father was stoical about his diagnosis when he was in his early 50s. He had weathered a war; people had shot at him and he had shot back, and I always had the impression he would be ready to go at any time. My mom panicked over his illness but bore her own with amazing courage. She was playing bridge with her cronies up to the end, never letting on that she was in frightful pain. In fact, I’m not sure she ever told my father the full extent of her illness, or that she’d been diagnosed with liver cancer, a killing version of the disease. Though she knew her death was impending, for good or for ill she opted stay silent almost until the end.

But there’s been nothing from them, not a word or touch or breath, not even an intimation that there may be something out there. I guess that 21 years ago when I spread my mother’s ashes on the green grasses of the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris and followed the same ritual for my father a few years later, well, that was it. Whoever and whatever they were was subsumed by the greater universe. Their individualities, who they were, simply ceased to be.

That’s strange to me. I’m not religious but as I grow older and my own cancer refuses to go away, I’d like to think something—other than the fading memories of us that are held by others—remains after our death. And maybe it does and I simply haven’t been privy to it.

Whatever. I suppose if Maman et Pape are up there and want to get in touch, they know where I am better than I know where they are…

Two Kinds of Kindness

This is from my writer friend Therese Doucet. Her book, The Prisoner of the Castle of Enlightenment, is available on Amazon.

We hear a lot about the divisions in our country these days that seem to be contributing to no end of problems – racial tensions, a global pandemic, soaring unemployment, the general decline of our democracy, just to name the most recent crises. We are led to believe that these divisions stem from politics and identity, and are about whether we’re Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, pro-Sanders or pro-Biden, Trump supporters or Trump opponents, white versus people of color, rural or urban, old or young, and so on.

One thing a lot of us have in common across these visible divides is that we want to think of ourselves as kind, good people. However, there’s a deeper and far less visible divide within this common longing: two very different ideas of what kindness means.

The two different ideas of kindness are kindness based on principle, and kindness based on loyalty. Principled kindness is based on the idea that human beings have intrinsic worth and are deserving of empathy, compassion, and basic respect just because they are human beings who exist on this earth. Kindness based on loyalty, on the other hand, means we are kind to people on the condition that they agree with us, they think like us, they are part of our group, they like the things or people or ideas we like, and hate the things or people or ideas we hate. The loyalty-based view of kindness holds that if people disagree with us, we punish them or retaliate against them by withdrawing our kindness and treating them with contempt and hatred.

An example of loyalty-based kindness would be the Trump administration sending supplies of PPE during the pandemic to states like Florida that are perceived as loyal and supportive, and withholding PPE from states like Michigan that are perceived as disloyal, actions which Trump supporters view as totally fair and totally in line with what kindness means. Meanwhile, I frequently hear threats from my fellow Trump opponents that they will cut off and ostracize long-time friends and family members if the friends and family continue to support Trump, actions that these anti-Trumpers view as being for the sake of kindness, to defend all the out-group members who are harmed by Trumpian partisanship.

Those of us who urge principled kindness towards all people regardless of political loyalties are deemed weak, complicit, and disloyal to party ideals, and our refusal to embrace hatred and contempt towards “the enemy” is viewed as false allyship worthy of the same contempt as enmity. And of course, the anti-Trumpers who are steeped in this contempt fail to see that they have embraced the same notion of loyalty-conditioned kindness as the pro-Trumpers.

This is not to say that pro-Trumpers and anti-Trumpers are morally equivalent in the policies they advocate: what I am saying is that they share a notion of kindness being properly conditioned on ideological agreement and on how loyal and useful the other person is to the causes one embraces. In both cases, people are deemed worthy of kindness depending on whether they are “us” or “them.” We are good, moral, and upright, and they are bad, dumb, and degenerate. If you’re not with us you’re against us. My way or the highway. To be different, to dissent, to think independently, to differ even slightly or subtly, is to render oneself an enemy.

Of course, kindness that is conditioned on loyalty is not really kindness at all, but simply an exercise of power relations. It is part of a system of rewards and punishments that is oriented to achieving control and influence.

True kindness is based in a humanist philosophy that human beings have intrinsic worth and should be viewed as ends in themselves. The opposed idea of kindness based on loyalty is anti-humanist, based on the idea that others only have value in so far as they are useful to us. In this anti-humanist way of thinking, people should be treated as means to ends. People are useful to us if they boost our sense of self-worth by agreeing with our ideas. They are valueless and worthy of contempt if they disagree, even if in reality the disagreement is based in a principled concern with truth and compassion, rather than any lack of love for us. The anti-humanist philosophy is dehumanizing because it makes people into tools and objects to be manipulated to achieve our goals.

This anti-humanism that makes kindness into a power relation is flourishing on the Left and on the Right. And it is this division, between those who view kindness as a principle and those who view it as a mechanism of control, that is the true rift driving us further and further into our state of crisis.

You might think that a Judeo-Christian religious heritage could be the solution to this profound division, and part of the problem might be the secular rejection of theism. In Christianity there’s the principle “love thy neighbor.” And in the Jewish Talmud, there is a beautiful vision of the sacredness of human life in the saying that if anyone destroys a single person, it’s as if they destroyed an entire world. On the other hand, what basis would an atheist or an agnostic have for believing in the Golden Rule or in the intrinsic worth of the human soul, without first embracing the faith that we are all equally children of God? But in reading the work of a Nazi philosopher from Weimar Germany, Carl Schmitt, it was fascinating to me that he interpreted the Christian idea of loving one’s neighbor as, essentially, loving the fellow members of one’s in-group, not loving members of the out-group. Just as Trump is seen as a loving Jesus to his white Christian base, but a tough and protective fatherly strongman admirable in his abuse of everyone else, Schmitt viewed Jesus as a deity of partisanship. Of course, this interpretation ignores the parable of the Good Samaritan, where the point is clearly to praise kindness that extends to the outsider. But it is also fascinating how few on either the Right or the Left seem to fully understand that in embracing the idea of kindness as a power relation rather than a humanist principle, they’re literally embracing a Nazi idea of power and control being more important than principles, the idea that might makes right.

Religious faith is no guarantee of humanist ethics, since religion and the lack thereof so often get treated as just another in-group boundary in need of defending. That said, I think the vision of that Talmudic principle of each individual human containing a vast and complex world within, the vision of other people as beings filled with hidden potential for goodness and beauty, is one we can choose to embrace regardless of our religious views. We each individually have to grapple with our conscience to decide whether we will have the courage to put our faith in humanism, in each other, in love, compassion, and empathy, in our shared humanity, and in the sacred obligation to protect each other’s autonomy to be who we are as separate individuals, people who differ from one another in a multitude of ways, but who can still show each other love and kindness despite our differences.

If we choose kindness as a principle, this doesn’t mean failing to be strong advocates for the policies we believe in or failing to stand up for our rights and for equal justice for all. Martin Luther King Jr., a tireless advocate for Christian love and kindness, preached that “hate doesn’t drive out hate, only love can do that,” and at the same time rightly criticized the Northern liberals of his day for failing to commit thoroughly to the ideas of racial justice, and Southern moderates for remaining silent out of fear. What choosing kindness means is that the principle of kindness for its own sake underlies and motivates everything else we do.