In the absence of kindness

In September 2020, I presented a proposal to Brandon city council asking to change the name of Rosser Avenue.

The gist was that in my opinion, and that of some others, change was warranted because the city’s main street was named for a man, a Confederate general, Thomas Lafayette Rosser, who came from a slave-owning family and who actively fought to preserve slavery during the American Civil War, and who in speeches freely trumpeted his bigotry to receptive audiences.

A man, who as the engineer responsible for advancing the CPR railroad through Western Canada, was fired for lining his own pockets, and who subsequently threatened to kill the man who fired him. It seemed reasonable to me, if somewhat presumptuous, that citizens of Brandon would not want their main street named for a blatant racist, thief and thug.

I was convinced that this was a question of morality and community integrity. It was clear, however, that I had touched a nerve. In response to my proposal, I was greeted with online insults and name calling, “stupid,” “snowflake” and “buffoon” were memorable among them.

One individual told me that I was “exactly what’s wrong with the world,” while another bellowed, “if you don’t like it, get the hell out of ‘my’ hometown.” Responses were hostile and disdainful. Instead of providing reasoned arguments about the impracticality of the proposal, they chose to attack me, to impugn my character and worth, to diminish me as a person.

And now, it’s in this rapidly changing world in which disdain, hate, hostility and cruelty have gained footholds, that expressions of compassion and empathy, once thought to be virtues and cornerstones of mature, civil societies and established religions, have been twisted and contorted to represent weakness.

Somehow, in this increasingly divided world, it’s no longer acceptable to advocate for the poor, the disabled, the stranger, or the different. And so we develop quick-attack words, or we reshape old ones to jab disdainfully at individuals who do express concern for those who exist outside of the preferred group. At their greatest intensity, these words are spit out with anger, and in themselves expressions of hatefulness and violence.

Now, according to some who wield power and influence, the disadvantaged, the downtrodden, the ill and the elderly belong to a “parasite” caste, a class of leeches, syphoning money from federal coffers. Like the world’s richest human being, they believe that empathy, or genuine expressions of sensitivity and understanding of others who are less fortunate, is “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.”

It seems that a new freedom has emerged, or at least a retooled freedom. A freedom to disparage and ridicule those who are perceived as different … those who are “not like me.”

And it’s in this re-formed, insensitive and more aggressive freedom that permission again exists to use hurtful terms, slurs that demean and devalue the humanness of others. Slurs captured in the use of the “N Word” or the “R Word.” This, so disdainfully but gleefully enunciated by Kid Rock, who while wearing a ball cap embossed with the word “JESUS,” exclaimed to the delight of the television interviewer after holding a surgical mask over his mouth, that he will be going out for Halloween dressed as “a retard.”

This embedded perspective, so destructively held during the global Eugenics movement of the early to middle 20th century, that persons with intellectual disability are “life unworthy of life.” This group of people with intellectual disability, once called feeble minded and mentally retarded, so lacking in human value that they became the first 5,000 test victims of Hitler’s genocidal Zyklon B gas.

But more important it now seems, in this new world order, is that Kid Rock and others can breathe a sigh of relief because they’ve been freed to once again make fun of them.

In the words of G.M. Gilbert, the U.S. Army psychologist who interviewed all of “Hitler’s willing executioners” at the post-Second World War Nuremberg Trials:

“In my work with the defendants I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think that I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with (and for) their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

As I was reminded in September 2020, and have been many times since, I am flawed and culpable and far from a paragon of virtue. I’ve resided within the privileges and biases of my own ethnocentric and egoistic world. I understand that I’m not exempted, but we seem to live in an increasingly “me-first,” “don’t tread on me” world. A world in which acting for the “common good” of humanity seems increasingly uncommon. A world in which empathy, where it does exist, is often limited in expression to one’s own cosseted community of like-minded and like-appearing people.

But morality, we’re told, can only advance when we expand the circle of our concern for justice beyond the confines of our own “in-group”; when we extend our concern beyond ourselves and our own particular group to include the welfare of other human beings; when we demolish the structured, cloistered thinking that differentiates “them” from “us” … that differentiates the weak from the strong, the poor from the rich, the disabled from the able, the gay from the straight, the Black from the white … the structured, cloistered thinking that bellows “my kind is better than your kind!”

And this we know, the Jesus that Kid Rock featured on his ball cap did not insult or ridicule the vulnerable. He did not spit derision and contempt at those who were weaker or different. Instead, he told the multitudes … As you do unto these the least of thy brethren so too do you do unto me.

He taught lessons of compassion, of kindness and caring. He taught lessons about the meaning of justice, of empathy and understanding. He taught humility and not the bluster, arrogance and hatefulness emblematic in the words and demeanour of Kid Rock, and of so many of us it seems, in this increasingly divided world.

Henry James once wrote that “Three things in life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” And In the absence of kindness, said the poet Robert Burns: “Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.”

And in the absence of kindness, and of compassion, and in the absence of empathy … as Hitler’s willing executioners have shown, anything is possible.

» John Simpson is a retired professor of psychiatric nursing who taught at Brandon University.