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Could kindness and "good deeds" be the solution to bridging the current political divide in our country?
Brett Kavanaugh practiced almost nothing but kindness and good deeds, all his life. And drank beer.
Did his kindness and good deeds solve the problem for him?
No. As long as you have haters and liars trying to destroy you, all the good deeds in the world won't help you.
Got any other suggestions?
Winner, winner, chicken dinner.
Of course that does not mean that we should not be kind, like Brett Kavanaugh generally has been. But it does mean that one side being kind to the other, in an effort to appease that side, is not going to be the solution to our current political divisiveness problems. And we all know what sides I am talking about here.
As far as the left being kind to the right, LOL. Without the politics of personal destruction, who would they even be? Answer: someone other than who they are now. And that is what has to happen for our political divisiveness problems to go away.
It's a very lovely idea - perhaps you could get the younger Bushes to speak up to revive Bush Sr.'s hope of a "kinder, gentler nation."
But I fear that's not realistic. The Democratic Party ideally hopes to help people in need. They support all kinds of financial and legal programs for that, such as Obamacare. But you have to keep in mind that the Republicans, on the other hand, were the group that roared approval - I think it was at a McCain rally - at the idea of simply letting people who couldn't afford medical care to die, as if they were animals in the wild. The Republicans are the ones shrieking "String her up!" about Hillary, proposing an extrajudicial killing.
In other words, although of course there are exceptions, I think you're facing a totally oppositional mindset.
A big part of what the OP is talking about isn't about parties. It's about helping others as individuals, and through that means, helping to heal and conquer the divide that the parties stir up all too often.
My sons and daughter are Scouts (Cub Scout, Boy Scout and Venturing). The Boy Scout slogan is "Do a Good Turn Daily", and my older son carries a coin in his pocket with this slogan on it. We do our best to live this way, not just give lip service to it. No one wants to read a lengthy list of what we do, so I'll skip it, but we really do take it to heart.
It won't stop the craziness that has enveloped us, I don't think, but it would go a long way to helping us see each other as individuals instead of opponents, enemies, or the other team.
I'm registered as a Republican, my husband a Democrat, so I can certainly see both "sides" of a debate, and more often that not we agree on things. Amazing, right? The one things that drives BOTH of us crazy is when one party continually tries to claim the high ground. Why is it so hard for us to see that all Americans want this country to prosper. Politicians, as individuals, do too, but their first priority is to enrich themselves, and that means keeping their positions. Sadly, these days keeping themselves in power means they will play up (or down) the team aspect of things in order to get elected, and too many of us buy into it.
Maybe we should start a grass-roots movement to shun this nonsense. I'm all in. Are you?
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Could kindness and "good deeds" be the solution to bridging the current political divide in our country?
I think kindness and good deeds indeed can be a way to bridge the country. It lets you see "the other" as not some overzealous self-righteous knight-in-shining-armor type. Better yet, actually have a conversation with (not "at") "those people". Even if you do criticize their actions, keep it only about their actions - and not their essential worth as a person (meaning: their consciousness, life experiences, feelings, their capacity to combat badness when inspired to do so, their motivations, dreams, etc).
It's debatable if kindness will actually do good (here, meaning "surplus value", more satisfaction/pleasure/joy than you actually need to have a realistically humane quality of life [physical or mental]). But it seems that cruelty and personalized disrespect will certainly make things worse. If you're being a jerk only toward people who are pretty much in your camp, you only make yourself look bad. When you do it to others, you make your whole ideological kin-folks look bad (analogy to the 'visit foreign country' line some of you probably heard previously.
I speak as someone born, raised and lived in ultra-conservative North Louisiana (if the baseline is the percentage of non-Hispanic whites [my group] to vote on the conservative side on 'hot potato' socio-politico-cultural issues, Republican or further-right in Presidential elections, etc). Back then, before I left there to go to the (comparatively) big city, I was completely sold on the Reagan Republican ideology, and spent several years of my young adulthood listening to Rush Limbaugh. My late teens and early 20s, my ideology was very much influenced by Readers Digest articles and the loudest, most forcefully fervent, confident voices of the evangelical, if not fundamentalist, protestant theologies.
I moved to that '(comparatively) big city' a few years before the World Wide Web broke into the mainstream, so I didn't have an actual opportunity to have sustainable challenges to my political, social, and cultural outlooks. So it was easy to castigate liberals as "addlepadded do-gooders or outright subversives out to destroy the Republic" (as J. Mitchener put it). I thought it would just be a bigger version of all the places I'd been so far. Was I in for the culture shock of my life.
Yes, I did see a lot of "liberal" students who were snide and self-righeteous, but I saw a lot of other liberals who did not have a prickly personality, nor did the "artsy bohemian-looking" types I encountered seem like they had a strong hatred of conservative, traditional values types, even if they clearly disagreed with them. I also noticed that ideologically diverse environments sharpened my critical thinking skills. i.e. 'team red' and 'team blue', as we put it these days, is simply not a good basis for personal identity. Granted, these days I tend to be much more on 'team blue', but perhaps because of my age during my transition era, I could still appreciate the concerns about conservatives. More importantly, I can very much appreciate that people are much more than their politics (My brother and I argue about it all the time - argue in the dignified sense of the word, not squabbling - and for years besides).It's definitely helped me maintain my relationship with him, even after my increasingly leftward drift all these years.
Last but not least, I'll recommend you search for Phil Plait's YouTube Video "Don't Be a Jerk" (the polite way to put it. You can figure out what the actual title is). Warning: He is speaking to skeptics on how to deal with believers (but I wasn't searching for atheist / nontheist links on Youtube, if that's your worry), so he does presume the truth of the non-theist world view. Still, if you can shove that aspect aside, it's very insightful about how to deal with others with views profoundly different from yours.
No. Kindness and good deeds belong to those who merit it and deserve it. Subjective, like all things. To Trump and what he stands for, not hardly.
see. It post like this and a few others here that make me ask how people vote before I pull them out of a burning house.....Used to just rush in but not anymore.....
You go to the right places in this Country and kindness/good deeds are the norm not the exception. I.E. the guy that helped my daughter change a flat last week. Or neighbors helping a sick neighbor finish his harvest... Part and parcel if you live in the right parts of the country.....
I think you see it everywhere in the country if you look for it -- and don't see it even if it is right in front of you if you don't want to.
Whether or not kindness will 'solve' anything doesn't matter -- it's just the right thing to do. It just is.
Right away folks start hurling insults at the other side while discussing kindness. It's kind of sad that they can't even see in their attacks on the opposition they are in fact fighting against any notion that they can be compassionate and kind.
I don't believe either party is more hateful than the other. In each party their are hateful people and in each party there are more kind people than hateful.
Hateful is just loud and brassy and gets more attention.
If you need to think that you have to behave kindly because you are Christian -- you are not a compassionate, kind person.
Just be kind to be kind -- because it is the most humane thing. It's what should make us human -- is our inherent kindness.
It was not Islam that civilized the world.
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