In accounting, net worth is defined as assets minus liabilities. Essentially, it is a measure of what an entity is worth. (Jenifer Tuck)

The recent reveal that dozens of uber-rich movie stars and corporate execs paid up to $6.5 million to get their offspring into elite colleges, prompted U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts, Andrew Lelling, to remark, “This case is about the widening corruption of elite college admissions through the steady application of wealth, combined with fraud.”

I would argue it’s that and something much deeper, this need to outshine everyone else—Look at me, I’m king of the hill, top of the heap!—that is never fulfilled no matter how many $$$ you have in the bank, how many homes you own, the number of private jets you command, or your level of worldly accomplishment.

At root, it’s about a powerful lack of self-worth.

This Behemoth Called Self-Worth

Much has been inked about self-worth. Where does it come from? In what conditions does it thrive or perish? Who’s to blame when it’s lacking?

A not atypical article in Psychology Today points a finger at disapproving authority figures, uninvolved caregivers, and the media’s penchant for airbrushing all flaws (which makes the rest of us feel like so much wrinkled flotsam).

Though some or all of these factors may play into any individual case, I think the issue goes much deeper. After all, there are those of us who suffered the perpetual disapproval of draconian authority figures (call them Mom and Dad) and have survived to tell the tale, self-worth intact. And then there are many others, with seemingly doting families, who never stop feeling the need to impress. I’m betting at least one of the fifty parents charged in the college admissions cheating scandal came from a reasonably supportive home.

Generation to Generation

Lucian J. Truscott IV writes in Salon: “One of the parents in my daughter’s kindergarten class in Los Angeles some years ago was constantly saying, ‘well, you know my daughter Ophelia will be going to Harvard, so…’”

Truscott reports he was shocked by these assertions. “How did any five year old know what college they wanted to attend?” he asks.

I had a similar experience when my daughter was in second grade. At a parent/teacher conference, I was asked, “What do you want most in life for Lauren?” Taken aback—she was just a little kid—and never comfortable with the idea of formulating goals for other people, I murmured, “I want her to be … happy. What else would a parent want?” Her teacher then informed me that other parents wanted Ivy League schools, CEO slots, a career in law, medicine, the major leagues.

I suspect these parents’ efforts to convince the teacher that our child is one of the elite was no more than a mask to hide their insecurity about their own true worth. But what are they teaching their kids? No doubt, the same lesson the parents in the college admissions scandal passed on to their children: You are not enough as you are. Little Susie III is not bound for the Ivy Leagues because it’s clear she’s overflowing with talent, superior in every way. She must be accepted by a Harvard or Princeton because without that big name next to her own, it’s feared she may be found a nothing.

Generation to generation and far as the eye can see. It’s bigger than a fault-finding mom. More powerful than a botox ad that promises to nuke your “imperfections.” I believe when it comes to lack of self-worth, we are talking systemic.  

Drinking the Kool-Aid

As a society, we are goal-directed, not process-focused. Intent on competing rather than developing. So future-oriented that we ignore the only moment we ever actually live: Now. And everything is conditional:

We’ll be happy if …

We’ll feel admired when …

We’ll have proven our worth if …

Worthy of what? According to whom?

Steeped in these less-than-subtle messages, it’s hard not to drink the Kool-aid. But we pay a high price when we do.

Writer Elad Nehorai describes how he spent 20 years of his life struggling to prove himself worthy. “I saw every failure as a sign that I was worthless. Part of the evidence against my soul. I saw every success as something I had to grab onto, hold onto for dear life for whenever the court case was brought against me.

“This is no way to live, this ‘judgment’. And it’s not just about morality. It’s about reality. Judgment implies a fixed-state of things. It implies no change. It implies lack of growth. But life is the opposite of fixed. Life is a verb. An action. A motion.

“As this realization has oozed its way into my mind, I’ve learned to embrace failure as a part of my ever-evolving attempts to grow into a better person… I’ve learned to stop trying to impress people.”

Striving, Striving—Where Does It End?

The beauty of a transformation like Nehorai’s is that you don’t have to do anything. You just have to let go. Proving to the world that you’re a winner (and what is that?) is exhausting. Even if you are declared “the best” at something (By whom? Who died and made them king?), what you ultimately “win” is a lifetime of looking over your shoulder, tensed, waiting to be dethroned by someone new. A better, fresher “best.” Ask Lance Armstrong.

The youngest U.S. amateur cycling champion of his day, Armstrong went on to win the Tour de France seven times in a row. For a competing cyclist, it just doesn’t get more prestigious than that. But Armstrong was stripped of these titles and banned from all sports that follow the World Anti-Doping Code when it was discovered he’d been using performance-enhancing drugs for much of his career.

Did he take drugs because he was afraid that without them he’d never break world records? He’d already won some very notable races before the doping began. Why risk so much when his future looked so bright? The problem with constantly having to prove yourself to others, to dazzle them with your greatness is that there is no “finish line.” It was this insatiable need to keep outdoing everyone else that ended Armstrong’s career.

Actress Felicity Huffman toiled several decades to earn her breakout roles in Desperate Housewives and Transamerica. Now, her guilty plea in the college bribery scandal has cast an uncertain shadow over her future. Vanity Fair reports that Huffman’s new Netflix film Otherhood, set to debut in late April, has been postponed until August 2. This need for a showcase school that screams POWER, WEALTH, SUPERIORITY, was it worth it? Isn’t it a teensy bit possible that her child and the children of the others accused could have done just as well at a less tony institution? Many have.

Neurosurgeon, author, and reporter, Sanjay Gupta graduated from the University of Michigan with a bachelor’s degree in biomedical sciences.

Billionaire business investor Warren Buffet completed a degree in business administration at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

The incredible Maxine Waters, U.S. Rep for California’s 43^rd district, graduated from California State University, Los Angeles with a degree in sociology.

One has only to look at TheRUMP’s body posture in White House videos—angry scowl, arms crossed defensively tight—to realize that multi-million dollar wealth, and the U.S. presidency to boot, are not enough to grant one a true sense of self-worth. “Nobody has ever done so much in the first two years of a presidency as this administration. Nobody!” he repeats to anyone who will listen. Who is he trying to convince? If you’re the greatest, you don’t have to prove it.

Armstrong. Huffman. Trump. Striving, striving. Desperate. Never certain.

Trust me, you don’t want to be these people.

Breaking Out of Junior High

Developmentally, we start measuring ourselves—smarts, talents, looks, class—against each other around age six. You can see it in any first-grade classroom. How we stack up against our peers reaches painful, epic proportions for most of us in early adolescence. I wrote about my own experience with this in a previous post, but suffice it to say I was miserable at age 12, craving to be liked by the “cool kids,” fretting about my hair (wavy in an era of straight), my clothes, my every utterance. After much effort, I was invited to join some of these kids at a football game where I quickly realized how much they bored me. This freed me to be myself and connect with more compatible people. I was lucky to learn this in junior high.     

The tragedy is this: Many people never get out of junior high. They spend their whole lives performing for others.

Recently, I came across this sage observation by psychologist Michael Schreiner: “You put yourself in a precarious position when you feel the constant need to prove yourself because all of a sudden your behavior centers not around furthering your own self-actualization but around living up to the demands and opinions of those around you, demands and opinions that might actually have little to do with your interests and much to do with theirs.”

Self-worth is not a panacea for doubts. Doubts help us to review, to question, to rethink a project, a relationship, the path we’re on. Self-worth is not a bulwark against failure. Failing is part of the process whereby we learn and go on to fail better and better until we maybe succeed. Sometimes it’s a long process. The beauty of self-worth is that all these evaluations and efforts are inner-directed, not outer-directed. It is the confidence to believe only you can judge what’s valuable in your life, where your energies should be directed. Warning: Sometimes other people will dislike you intensely for this. In those moments, it helps to remember that such rebuffs are almost always a comment on the rebuffer’s insecurity about their own true worth, not a reflection of you.

So pursue what you love. Take the rejection of others in stride.

And your true net worth?

You are more than enough. Believe it. And be free.

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to. 
Don’t try to see through the distances. 
That’s not for human beings. 
Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move. 
(Rumi)

[The Spin: What better time than April, the month of Earth Day, to recycle a post from another April—with several spiffy additions applied like a new coat of (non-toxic) paint?

The Truth: Major time-crunch this past month—final revisions, agent searches, query letters. Every writer knows the drill. I promise to be back next month with a scintillating brand new post. Until then, rejoice. We have survived another winter.]

When I was in my twenties, I imagined that by 40 or so (when I imagined such an advanced age at all), I would have acquired a certain grace at living. Grace implied to me a kind of sanguine wisdom, the possession of which would enable me to transcend all things petty, leaving me unshakably calm. 

Ha-ha.

More recently, combing through birthday cards for a friend, I came across this gem: “With age comes wisdom.” (Inside) “But sometimes age comes alone.”

We’re getting closer to the truth here.

It’s something of a universal practice to pause on our birthday and consider what (if anything) the years have taught us. To reflect on the hand dealt us, how we’ve played it, and what we might do with the cards we still hold.

 So, with another orbit of the sun completed since my arrival on the planet, I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve learned—and some of the things I still hope to learn but haven’t quite yet got the hang of. It’s not Rumi. It may not even be Kung Fu Panda, but it’s mine own. 

What I’ve Learned

1. When riled to record heights of anger by the insensitive, the stupid, and the just plain nasty, do NOT under any circumstances tell the annoying person what you REALLY think of them.  However eloquent anger may make you, however deeply satisfying it is to take down the offender with your verbal arrows, beware: The gods enjoy messing with us. At some unforeseeable moment in the future, in a setting you cannot now imagine, this person is bound to reappear in your life—as the interviewer for a job you really want, as a member of the critique group you just joined, as your child’s teacher. On that day you will be extremely happy that you kept your mouth shut.

2. When you are the dufus in the room, own it straight out and laugh at yourself. The reality of life is this: People spill drinks. They trip on stairs. Call someone by the wrong name. Trail toilet paper on their shoe. A few even fart.  Look at it this way: Everyone else gets a kick out of your embarrassing moments, so why shouldn’t you?    

3. Trust your intuition. That still, small voice you hear at critical junctures in your life? It’s not just some telemarketer from deep space. It’s the real you telling yourself what you already know at gut level. People put their faith in the stock market, in lottery tickets, in Vegas. How much crazier is it to trust your gut? On the brink of college graduation, utterly broke and armed with only a degree in English, my intuition spoke up one night as I sat listening to a musician friend in a local pizza pub. Right in the middle of “City of New Orleans,” it said: “You’ve got a vagabond heart. Do what you’ve always loved doing. Go be a writer.” I’m grateful everyday that I listened.

4. Ignorance is not bliss; it is a false comfort and a temporary one at best. There are public examples of this: Climate-change denial in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and the recent floods that have drowned a host of Midwestern states. Everyone who looked the other way as Hitler rose to power and built the death camps. And personal examples: Ignoring the symptoms of cancer, or the signs that a relationship is becoming abusive. Things ignored do not disappear. More often, they incubate until you have a really nasty mess to deal with. In my experience, it’s best to travel with your eyes wide open.

5. You must play your cards from the hand you hold. Not the hand you wish you’d been dealt. Not the hand you feel life unfairly stole from you. But the cards you actually have. I call this the Yahtzee dilemma. Okay, I’m mixing my games in this metaphor, but stay with me. I know what I’m talking about.

I play a fair amount of online Yahtzee when the long day’s work is over (and sometimes even when it’s not). I play against a character named Bill. Bill likes sixes—Yahtzee’s highest number, for the uninitiated. If he gets three 1s, a 4, and a 6 on his first roll, rather than build on his 1s, he ditches everything but the 6 and tries to get more of those in the remaining two rolls. This often results in Bill getting zippo and losing the 35 bonus points for the top half. I hate to say this, Bill, but that kind of “thinking” is NOT thinking. It’s insisting on a roll of the dice you didn’t get. It’s a stubborn refusal to recognize the 1s as your strength in this case. Okay, maybe not so much glory in 1s, but I beat Bill most of the time. The hand you hold/your roll of the dice is what you have. Use it to your best advantage.

6. Never sell your soul for money. My parents spent their lives accruing money, thinking about money, worrying about money. In exchange, they got the dream house, the country club membership, two luxury cars in the garage. But it never seemed to make them particularly happy. We all need food, shelter, a little fun, but I think the luckiest people are those who grasp the concept of “enough.” They enjoy a freedom that all the money in the world can’t buy. I’ll bet my dodgy 2001 Ford Focus on that. 

7. If you possess the true, abiding love of at least one other person in this world, you can survive anything.

What I’ve Yet to Learn But Hope To

1. Don’t put your life on post-its, at least not the dinky 2” x 2” ones. At any one time, I have 100 or so of these colorful little squares floating over the surface of my desk. A random sampling of their deathless reminders to me include:

The human capacity for deception

A spy? See Condell perfs in Jonson’s play

Given QED

The really important ones are actually taped to the front of my desk where the sun fades them to obscurity over time.

2. When settling in to binge-watch a favorite series, resist the urge to grab a bag of M&Ms, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Cheetohs (or anything else packing a month’s worth of calories) with the promise that you’ll stop after “a few.” You won’t.  

3. Never shop for clothing when you are at the bottom of your weight range. For the record, I’m not much of a shopper, but the one thing that will propel me to the nearest mall is losing 4-5 pounds. Giddy (from lack of food), I plop down my Visa card and before you know it, I have a couple new pairs of jeans and two or three sleek little tops that look great . . . until I eat my next slice of pizza.  

4. Stop counting the minutes, hours, days. Forty’s in the rearview mirror, and grace, that slippery imp, continues to evade my grasp.  Like the Rumi quote that opened this post, I’m still discovering what it means. Perhaps in another decade or two, I’ll get there and learn to take everything as it comes. 

Given QED

In the depths of winter, watching my cats chase their tails, and regretting that I have no tail to chase, I ponder how I’ll survive still more months of boots and snow and frigid gray, knowing dark day after dark day remains before I can break out my flip flops and tank tops, before I can roll down the car windows and crank up Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone.

And TheRUMP’s still sitting in the Oval.

As Thomas Paine noted, These are the times that try men’s souls.

So, this month I’m blowing off some steam, indulging in a grouse-fest. No, not those funny little birds with the nifty tails, but grumbles about what are, admittedly, First World problems. We have not yet surrendered our right to kvetch.  

Here, then, in no particular order are: 

 10 Things I Can Do Without in 2019

1. Sloooooow right-turning drivers. I don’t know if this is endemic to my little town in the Northeast or if it’s a national epidemic, but what is so complicated about making a right turn? I’m sitting there, four cars back, say, when the light goes green. I rev my engine hopefully but nothing happens. No one moves. Is the driver at the front breezily chatting on their phone? Chowing down on a take-out taco? Are they napping? Dead?

Just as I’m fantasizing about mounting a loudspeaker on my car roof like Jake and Elwood in The Blues Brothers—Okay folks, let’s whip it up here. Turn! Turn! Turn!—the green light changes to yellow, and I see the front car slowly, slowly making that right turn, a maneuver it completes just as the light goes red.

2. Clueless and/or surly salesclerks. Okay, I’ve worked my share of humdrum jobs and I’m familiar with the adage Minimum work for minimum wage, but when I ask what aisle the gingerbread is in, I don’t want a smirk and a shrug. I don’t want to be told “Beats me.” I want clarity: You’ll find that in aisle three. I want a pro-active attitude. I’m not sure but I’ll find out. I want you to live up to the snappy words on your company tee-shirt: Friendly, Helpful, Knowledgeable, Courteous. (And what kind of acrostic is FHKC???) 

3. Retail Seasonal Disorder. While we’re dealing with retail, why is it that when I’m searching for Halloween decorations in September, the seasonal aisle is filled with Christmas stockings? Then two months later, when I want Christmas stockings, I’m greeted by shelves stacked high with Valentine’s candy boxes? Better grab one now (however stale the candy will be on February 14) because by mid-January, the only thing on offer will be plastic picnic tablecloths and citronella candles. Chill, retail people. Don’t rush the seasons. Be where you are.

4. Password Frenzy. Speaking of the need to chill, what is it with all these websites that demand you change your password every time you log in? Don’t they realize that the average Internet user already has something like a zillion passwords to juggle, each of them with a dozen characters—numbers, capitals, ampersands and pound signs? Okay, maybe this level of hyper vigilance makes sense for credit card accounts, but Rewards card sites? Box-office aggregators? Healthcare billing systems? The stated purpose for this ever-shifting quicksand of passwords is to keep cyber-thieves in the dark. Well, I’m in the dark. My passwords are a mystery to me. And if some hacker really feels like picking up the tab for my dental insurance, I say let them go right ahead.

5. Wise-a$$ printers. Since we’re in the land of cyberspace, I’ll mention a recent come-on I received from Staples, a sign-up for something called “Smart Ordering.” Ink and toner automatically ordered by your printer before you run low, the promo ran.

Ink and toner ordered at the whim of my printer? Charged automatically to my credit card? I’ll give this the same response I gave my (former) pets’ vet team when they suggested I leave my credit card on file at their clinic—a clinic that loved nothing more than to think up all the possible tests, lab work, procedures, et cetera it could perform on my cats. After collapsing in a helpless heap of laughter, I told them: Not. On. Your. Life.

6. Auto automatons. Following up on the mania for granting technical gizmos human powers, is anyone else hyperventilating about all this near-future hoopla over self-driving cars? And not only self-driving cars, but TheRUMP is now pushing for self-driving buses and trucks. Big trucks.

According to the Washington Post, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao is “extremely concerned” about the impact these autonomous vehicles will have on the nation’s workforce. Hell, I’m concerned about the impact they’ll have on human life. The day 18-wheelers start cruising the Interstate under their own steam is the day I burn my driver’s license and become a full-fledged pedestrian. A pedestrian who avoids the shoulder. Who maybe cuts through backyards and wooded lots. I read Stephen King’s Christine.

Okay, take a deep breath. Onward.

7. Days full of errands and appointments. Do I need to say more? Is there anyone out there who jumps out of bed and shouts Whoopee! I’ve got to go to the hardware store and the supermarket, then straighten out that billing mess with the electric company, and after lunch, it’s the dentist!

My idea of nirvana is a blank calendar. A month of pristine days, unsullied by boring places to go and annoying things to do. Don’t worry—I’ll think of some way to fill those long, lovely hours.

8. Life revisionists. The tendency to paint a picture-perfect life in holiday letters, or on Facebook and Twitter has reached epic proportions. You know, the gentle fictions where the writer goes from success to success—a volley of promotions, a whirlwind of exotic vacations. All is happiness and the kids are geniuses, enrolled at Harvard or Georgetown.

These narratives remind me of Garrison Keillor’s fabled town Lake Wobegon, “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” For anyone out there who feels the temptation to gild the lily, know that we’ll still love you even if you admit to being warty humans like the rest of us. In fact, we’ll probably love you more.

9. Robotic interrogation. When I call a company regarding a problem with their product or service, I want to talk to a REAL PERSON. I do not want to suffer an hour of robotic interrogation, while shouting YES! and NO! into my phone, only to be disconnected (arrrggghhhh!) during the transition to an actual person (if such a person exists) who might have helped solve my problem.  

10. Rudy Giuliani. I want him to stop explaining why Mueller and/or Hillary should be investigated. I want him to stop bragging that he can produce 20 witnesses to defend TheRUMP’s hush money payments (he can’t). I want him to stop pretending he has a working brain. Just … shut … up.

My daughter Lauren wrote a scathing letter to this charlatan when she was in second grade and he was mayor of New York, lambasting him for his reactionary racist policies. If an 8-year-old can see through you, it’s time to stop the charade and remove yourself to some remote island where you can’t annoy anyone.

Okay, I’m stepping down from my soapbox. As the patient in one of my favorite cartoons says (having just tossed his shrink out the window), “Gee, I feel better already.” Spring is nearer than it was when I started this post. I can almost smell the lilacs blooming. Feel the warm, gentle breezes caressing my toes.

And Mueller is closing in.

How little do they see what is, who frame their hasty judgments upon that which seems. (Robert Southey)

As a kid growing up in the Baby Boom that followed World War II, I was indoctrinated in what was to become the “official” American view of the French in that devastating conflict. The narrative went something like this:

With Hitler on their doorstep in the summer of 1940, the French turned cowards at Dunkirk, leaving in dire peril the 350,000 or so British soldiers who had come to their aid. Too lazy to fight for their country, the French let the Germans overrun Paris. But what could one expect, really? They were pretty much Nazi-sympathizers and collaborators, who after the war hid their cowardice and complicity by claiming some mythically high number of French Resistance members.

The anti-democratic and collaborationist policies of Marshal Pétain’s Vichy government, who signed an Armistice with Germany in June of 1940, only served to reinforce this unflattering portrait of cowardice and collusion.

Of course, this neat narrative, like all pat explanations, is woefully simplistic and more than a tad xenophobic. Whole libraries have been written about World War II, and to read even a small portion of this documentation is to quickly grasp the thick tangle of issues and personalities involved.

• The rapid and unexpected collapse of the Maginot Line, which the French had built in the 1930s, believing it would significantly slow any invading force and protect their industrial basin in Alsace-Lorraine.
• The struggle for control of France’s overseas empire between the collaborationist Vichy government and the Free French forces aided by Britain and the United States. A sort of war within a war.
• Concerns about preserving Paris from the utter annihilation that artillery, tanks, and bombs would bring.
• And, of course, the continual disagreements among the various political and military leaders—French, British, and (eventually) American—about best responses to any and all these issues.

A description of Oxford historian Robert Gildea’s book Fighters in the Shadows illustrates the knotty muddle of just one part of this mix:

“[The] French resistance was part of a Europe-wide struggle against fascism, carried out by an extraordinarily diverse group: not only French men and women but Spanish Republicans, Italian anti-fascists, French and foreign Jews, British and American agents, and even German opponents of Hitler. In France, resistance skirted the edge of civil war between right and left, pitting non-communists who wanted to drive out the Germans and eliminate the Vichy regime while avoiding social revolution at all costs against communist advocates of national insurrection.”  [My italics.]

So, what are we to believe here? How do we separate the strands of fact from fiction? Is there some larger question we should be asking before we rush to judgment?

This past September, I viewed an exhibit, “Renewal: Life After the First World War,” at London’s Imperial War Museum. A section of the exhibit focused on the impact of that war on France. Like many people, I’ve seen countless movies about the fighting in the Somme, at Verdun and Amiens. The endless stretches of gut-ripping barbed wire. The hand-to-hand fighting in the trenches. The shell-shock and gassing. Brutality on steroids. But it wasn’t until I saw the dozens of photos in the IWM exhibit that I understood how thoroughly France had been devastated. They took a drubbing like no other country in that war. The photos looked like the images we see of Syria today. Whole towns and cities reduced to rubble. Acres and acres of farmland and countryside blackened, barren.

Gazing at these photos—casting a wider eye—a light bulb went on. I realized the deeper, pertinent question was not were the French cowards in the face of the Nazi onslaught, but given the utter devastation to their country, the mind-numbing loss of people and towns, the years and resources it took to rebuild after that first war, who in their right mind would be eager to rush into a second annihilation?

To cast a wider eye in search of a deeper understanding is not to court “alternative facts,” but to consider the full scope of a situation, what the law calls the “mitigating circumstances.”

Mitigating Circumstances

Some years ago, a friend of mine, a case worker in social services, told me about a Vietnamese family she knew, a single mother and her ten-year-old son.

The family came to her attention after an incident at the child’s school. The boy became ill in class one morning. When the school called the mother’s workplace, they learned that she had not been employed there for the past four months. No, there hadn’t been a problem with her work. Staff had simply been cut by a third. It was 2008. People were being laid off everywhere.

Mom wasn’t at home either. When questioned as to where she might be, the boy eventually said she was with “Uncle.” What was his uncle’s name? The boy shook his head. “Uncle” was what his mother called the man who paid their rent and gave her some money for groceries. Pressed further, he admitted she left him alone 3-4 days each month to go off with “Uncle.” She left food for her son and told him not to let anyone in the apartment, but he got scared sometimes at night when she was away, he confessed. 

Clearly, this was not a good situation. And the first response of many might be to call social services and report the mother as a delinquent parent whose child should be removed to foster care.

Fortunately, the person—a former teacher—who made the call cast a wider eye over the situation. Why would this woman—a devoted mother who never missed a parent-teacher conference, whose former part-time job had allowed her to be home when the boy returned from his after-school program each day, who slept on the sofa in their tiny apartment so that her son could have the single bedroom—why would this woman leave her child alone for days at a stretch to go off with some man?

She asked herself what were the mother’s choices? Laid off from her job, with a child to house and feed, as an immigrant with little education, what alternatives did she have?

And that question made clear the path forward. That the way to help this struggling family was not to tear it apart. That the relevant question here was not parental fitness but basic survival.

The mother was given help in finding a new job that would work with her son’s school hours. She was also encouraged to enroll in a GED program—which she did—with an eye toward doing a two-year degree at the local community college. She and her son moved to a new address, one unknown to “Uncle,” and she was advised she could get a restraining order if he ever approached her again.

The Complicated Sticky Stuff of Life

Many people would not take an action that put their job at risk. And fewer still would trust a roomful of six-year-olds to keep their secret. My first-grade teacher did both.

Back in the day when teachers ran copies of math problems and spelling worksheets on something called a mimeograph machine, we had three holiday parties each year in my school: Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s. Leave-it-to-Beaver type moms called “room mothers” baked cookies for these occasions, and we played games. They were the three best days of school, and every kid eagerly awaited them. Except Tim.

Like Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer, Tim didn’t get to join in any holiday games. His parents were strict Seventh Day Adventists and celebrating holidays was a no-fly zone. They kept him home while we played Musical Chairs in our Halloween costumes. They kept him home while we ate fancy Santa Claus cookies and drank cocoa. But they didn’t keep him home for the Valentine’s Day bash. That was because our teacher did not tell them about the Valentine’s party. And, with a finger to her lips, she asked us not to tell anyone about her omission.

Yes, yes, I know this is so not kosher. When I recounted this story during seminar in my M.Ed. program, I thought the instructors would faint on the spot just hearing it. We are talking a “fetch the smelling salts” level of horrification here. And I get that. The parents’ wishes must be respected. Kids should not be asked to keep secrets. It is serious stuff.

And yet. 

When my teacher asked for our complicity, she explained it was so Tim could join in our Valentine’s celebration. If we blabbed, Tim would miss yet another party.

Six-year-olds are more savvy than they are often given credit for. There wasn’t a child in the room who didn’t understand the stakes for Tim. There wasn’t one of us who hadn’t felt the yoke of adult choices crushing our own power to choose. I believe no one said a word.

What I recall about that Valentine’s party is that it was the best of all my elementary school holiday parties. A normally quiet child, Tim laughed out loud throughout the festivities and hooted joyfully when he won the egg and spoon race. It was his day. And we were all witnesses to this miraculous event—the rebirth of a classmate.

Was the teacher right to ignore the parents’ wishes concerning their child?

Was she wrong to give a child a day of happiness and a sense of belonging?

Life is frequently much more complicated, more tangled, than yes and no. Rules do not admit of extenuating circumstances, and yet what of consequence does not involve extenuating circumstances? What are the exceptions and who decides?

Not the Whole Story

On my first—and last—summer home from college, I worked at the local mall. My favorite co-worker was a girl named Marion. Buoyant and bubbly like a 1960s sitcom Donna Reed, she made me laugh and I made her laugh and it was a very jolly way to pass the hours in a minimum-wage prison. After my last shift before returning to college, we hung out for an hour or so at a Labor Day weekend fair, set up in the mall parking lot. We rode the Scrambler, the Tilt-a-Whirl, and some other ride that took us stomach-lurchingly high in the air and turned us upside down. Then I gave Marion a lift home. We would not be seeing each other again that summer. And though I didn’t give it any real thought at the time, in all likelihood we would never see each other again. Which is, perhaps, what made the next thing possible.

As she got out of the car—moving quickly, beyond reach of a comforting hug, beyond hearing any possible reply I might give—Marion whispered over her shoulder, “My grandfather used to rape me every night.” With those words, she was gone, up the walk, onto the porch, the screen door banging behind her, leaving me stunned.

So much seems simple and clear—until you dig a little deeper. Until you pull the camera back and cast a wider eye.

Casting a wider eye doesn’t always make things clearer. In fact, it tends to muddy the neat narratives we seem to prefer, with their clear steps leading to tidy conclusions. In the judgments we make, we are often like the fabled blind men describing an elephant, drawing overarching conclusions about the whole from a limited experience/knowledge. What we have heard or seen may be part of the story, but not the whole story.

Judgment involves a willingness to look beyond what seems obvious, the patience to gather and sift seemingly contradictory facts, and compassion.

Above all, compassion.

“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.”  (Winston Churchill)             

I was driving along in August—98˚ in the shade, rush-hour traffic inching forward, some Cars tune on the local oldies station—when I noticed a bumper sticker on the Honda to my left: Be kinder than is necessary. Something lifted in my heart. A breeze penetrated the mug. At the next opportunity, I pulled over to the side of the road and jotted down those words on the back of a grocery receipt. Be kinder than is necessary.

To say we live in divisive times is like saying arsenic will kill you. Duh. And there are real issues we must confront attached to these divisions—racism, immigration, misogyny, healthcare, the environment, democracy itself—but that’s in the aggregate. On a molecular level, each of us deals with the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker—our neighbors and fellow community members. Not cardboard demographic representations. Not a frenzied TheRUMP rally mob screaming “Lock her up!” Or a deluge of polls dividing us 60/40, 40/60, 50/50. But real people with real faces. If we want to build a better world, this is an excellent place to start.

Wax and Wane

Homo sapiens are a quirky little species. We are both caring and cantankerous. Principled and sheeplike. Social and self-absorbed. Among our many tendencies is the kindness we demonstrate in moments of major crisis—natural disasters, wars:

Houston resident Jack Schuhmacher rescued numerous people trapped by the rising floodwaters of Hurricane Harvey, ferrying them to safety in his 17-foot fishing boat. 

Hermine “Miep” Gies, her husband, and three other Dutch citizens risked their lives for more than two years to hide Anne Frank’s family and four other Jews from the Nazis. It was Miep who grabbed Anne’s diary in the mayhem of the arrests, keeping it safe until Anne’s father returned from Auschwitz in 1945.

Sadly, the sense that we’re all in this together tends to go dormant once a crisis wanes. People return to insular mode, making a living and looking after their own turf. Petty concerns predominate and rancorous rivalries erupt. Twitter wars ensue. But the reality remains: We ARE all in this together every day. If anything ultimately dooms us, it will be our failure to recognize the truth of this.

Beyond Necessity

Be kinder than is necessary. But, what is “necessary kindness”?Is it merely good manners—holding the door for someone carrying a child or packages, thanking someone who does the same for us? Is it mouthing the expected platitudes in certain situations? I was so sorry to hear that your father died/ I hope you’ll find another job soon/Wishing you a speedy recovery. Perhaps the word necessary here serves as a synonym for the minimum response required to not be thought rude or heartless. We are busy, busy people after all, and it’s just not possible to extend ourselves to all the need out there.

Until it’s us. Our sorrow. Our disaster. Our need.

Fortunately, being kinder than is necessary rarely involves the sort of mortal risk Miep took in hiding the Frank family. Sometimes it’s just—literally—going that extra mile.

In my student days, while doing a semester at the University of London, several of us decided to go to Paris for a long weekend via the Hovercraft from Ramsgate to Calais. Taking the train to Ramsgate was easy, but we had no idea where the docks were once we debarked. This was in the days before satnav, before the Internet and Mapquest. You got around mainly by asking the locals “Which way?”

The woman we asked for directions in Ramsgate could have reeled off a list of street names and left/right turns, as most people do. But she didn’t. Instead, she offered to walk us to the ferry landing, despite the fact that she was on her way home after a day of work, despite the fact that the docks were in the opposite direction of where she was heading. “It’s only a mile or so,” she said cheerfully, and off we went. I have never forgotten her.

A Simple Gesture Can Mean A Lot

Sometimes that extra shot of kindness is as simple as picking up your phone.

When I got into my VW Bug in the summer of 1983 and moved to Boston, I had just written my first novel. I had an IBM Selectric III, but nothing in the way of connections to editors or publishers. About a month after my arrival, I went for a haircut. During the usual salon banter, the hairdresser, Donna, asked what I did for a living. I explained I was the editor of a business publication for retailers, but what I really loved was writing fiction. Then I told her about my novel.

Now, she could have said that’s nice or I wish you luck or how exciting. But instead she said, “My cousin is an editor at Addison-Wesley. They don’t publish fiction but she might know someone working at another house. I’ll give her a call if you like.” I liked and she made the call right then. Her cousin invited me to have lunch with her in Reading (then-headquarters of A-W), at the end of which she called her old college friend, an assistant editor at Random House. My manuscript went out in the mail the next day. I received a lovely, enthusiastic note about the book from this woman. And though a senior editor later decided not to go with the manuscript, I was really grateful to my hairdresser, her cousin, and the RH assistant editor. It was my first experience wading into the often muddy waters of publishing, and their kind support kept me going.  

A double-shot of kindness is walking the walk. Demonstrating our compassion by offering material assistance, or bending the rules when people need help.

After a health emergency put the kibosh on a trip to London and Sicily—just days before we were scheduled to leave—I was faced with cancelling a slew of theatre tickets or losing a lot of $$$. Our Air B&B reservations and flights were refunded because we had trip insurance for those, but theatre tix always come with the disclaimer that all sales are final, no refunds. I wrote the various box offices anyway, briefly explaining our situation and asking if anything could be done. All but one of the twelve theatres refunded our money, and many wrote words of sympathy, expressing hope that Ed would be better soon. I was deeply moved by their kind notes and willingness to respond in a human way to a human situation. 

Paying It Forward: The Ripple Effect

And sometimes kindness with a capital K simply comes down to paying it forward.

Jerry took his first trip to America when he was just 23. Sent by his London employer to represent their firm at a meeting in New York City, he was cabbing to what he desperately hoped was the correct address. Upon sharing his anxiety with the cabbie, he was stunned to hear the man say, “Don’t worry. I’ll wait out front for you while you check it out. No charge.”   

Jerry couldn’t believe it. After everything he’d heard about the stereotypical New Yorker—self-absorbed, indifferent—he was blown away by this man’s kindness. “I promised myself right then that I would always seek ways to do something nice for Americans visiting the UK.” 

He told me this story as I was dining out with two friends in a cozy restaurant off London’s Baker Street. Jerry was a regular—knew the owner, the kitchen staff, loved to mix American-style cocktails for the diners. Overhearing us chatting, he came to our table to ask what part of the States we were from, a conversation that lasted well into the evening. And then he offered to take us to Pinewood Studios and show us around. He worked for Lloyd’s of London in their film insurance wing, and was scheduled for a meeting at Pinewood in the morning.   

We were excited—Pinewood Studios is a legend in British filmmaking. Fiddler on the Roof. The Man Who Would Be King. All of the Bond films. Jerry picked us up from our dorm in Regents Park the next morning and drove us to the studio where we enjoyed a tour of all the major sets and lunch with Pinewood’s director.  I have kept this photo of Jerry for decades, a memento of one man’s generous spirit.

Show a Little Faith

When I finally managed to make it through the drive-time traffic last August, I googled Be kinder than is necessary. The full quote, variously attributed, is Be kinder than is necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.

One of the bummer side-effects of our deeply-divided society is the suspicion and uncertainty it breeds among everyone. Rather than nodding and smiling at people we pass, we are now sizing them up at twenty paces—seeking clues from their clothing, hair, make of car, accent, job, vocabulary—and making snap assessments. Friend or foe? The anger out there becomes anger everywhere.

Is this making us happier? Is this solving our deepest, most pressing problems?

Categorizing comes easily to our species, but people as individuals are a lot more complicated than that. Yes, we have a swamp of BIG pressing issues and we need to fight for a more humane, just, sustainable world, but if we can’t show a little faith in each other, can’t open our hearts and stand by one another, what hope do we have?

Be kinder than is necessary. We must make that extra effort. Take that extra step. Open our generous hearts. Because we ARE all in this together. Every day.