ILLUSTRATION BY DOLA SUN
When you start a political action committee (PAC) with your neighbors to defeat school board candidates endorsed by an extremist group like Moms for Liberty, you might wind up with a few detractors. You will probably get called a leftist troublemaker. A Biden puppet. A radical. An idiot. Maybe even a Communist, if you’re Amy Madigan’s character and it’s the school board meeting scene in the movie Field of Dreams.
You may also get called hateful. Mean. Unkind. That’s exactly what happened last fall during our school board election in Madeira. While I do not have the spunk of Madigan’s character, rallying her fellow parents against censorship and book banning, I did write quite a few rousing social media posts about what happens in school districts when the book banners take over. And though my neighbors and I didn’t have Kevin Costner by our side, we fought like hell against the reactionary agenda threatening our district.
Because of our efforts, we were called a hate group by a small but very vocal minority. We were labeled Really Mean People and told that we were terrible examples for our children, who were watching us behave badly. The phrase “Shame on you!” was leveled quite a few times.
Spoiler alert: The community overwhelmingly agreed with us, and the nonpartisan candidates beat the Moms for Liberty ones by a margin of 3–1. All over the country, Moms for Liberty candidates running for seats on school boards lost. I wrote about the trend for CNN.com. There may have been a party at a friend’s house.
Being part of a PAC to keep the nonsense away from our school board was one of most gratifying, interesting, meaningful things I’ve done as a citizen. It felt like a small, great thing in a world full of big, bad things. So why did the charge of being unkind bother me so much?
In part, the charge is illogical. It’s completely bananas to say “Calling attention to discriminatory ideas that would harm families, cause teachers to quit, and turn our district into a media circus is really hurting people’s feelings!” But also, God, what if I’m actually mean?
I think of myself as a kind person. When someone is talking about me, I want them to say, “Judi? Oh, she’s really nice.” And when they say it, I want them to mean that I’m caring, empathetic, and able to focus what others may need.
Yes, it’s because I’m Midwestern. Yes, it’s because I’m a woman. (America Ferrera’s monologue in Barbie went viral for a reason.) But I still think there’s one more factor, probably something to do with the trauma of being picked on when I was younger and seeing other kids picked on and how absolutely terrible it made me feel. At some point, I made a promise to myself: I will never be mean like that.
But is it mean to fight for your community? Can you tell the truth about harmful ideas and policies without picking on people personally? Yes, I believe you can. And I believe that’s exactly what we did. Yet the nagging voice inside me says, Let’s also make the world kinder. I just don’t know what that means anymore.
Something is happening with kindness. In the words of Stephen Stills, What it is ain’t exactly clear. This much I know: Kindness is being weaponized. Especially by those governing our public schools.
You need look no further than the Forest Hills School District for an example. In 2021, a slate of school board members who ran on a platform of “anti-CRT” (not really a thing, but whatever) swept in. There was low voter turnout, typical for off-year elections. These new board of education members immediately passed a “Culture of Kindness” resolution. It sounds so lovely: a culture of kindness! I wish children, with their tendencies toward surliness, would be kinder to each other.
Except this Culture of Kindness banned assignments that asked students to consider their race, religion, gender identity, sexuality, or socioeconomic class. It doesn’t sound very kind to me to erase a young person’s identity inside the walls of their school.
In the end, after more than a year of protests, a lawsuit, and another election—this time lots of people came out to vote—the Forest Hills school board repealed its “kindness” resolution in December 2023. But it’s such a doozy that this gaslighting effort, a slap in the face to families, was tried in the name of kindness.
So I ask, once again, what does it mean to be kinder to one another? What is the value of niceness, and when is it just a trap, a glossing over of people’s anguish?
My 15-year-old son has taken to saying derisively to me, “You’re too nice.” He means it as an insult. A suggestion that I don’t understand the world the way he does. That I am too passive. That I don’t fight back enough. (Side note: It’s really fun to get life advice from teenagers.)
I usually just shrug and say, “I like being nice.” And then I say other things under my breath that aren’t all that nice.
But yes, I do like being nice. As I’ve gotten older, I’m better at giving people the benefit of the doubt. I’ve worked to become less judgmental, less entitled, and less personally offended by poor service or poor manners. I spent much of my 20s and 30s thinking a great majority of people were idiots, but now I tend to adopt the attitude that most people I encounter are probably trying to do the best they can with what they have.
Of course I still have my moments of frustration, when I rant against some ridiculous on-hold time or a poorly designed public bathroom. But I wouldn’t say I walk around spoiling for a fight when it comes to how people are treating me.
At the same time, I’ve come to loathe the culture of nice. Of toxic positivity. Thoughts and prayers. Good vibes only. Live, laugh, love. I especially detest the idea that you can “nice” away discrimination and policies that do harm and that we should all just “get along” instead of “focusing on the things that divide us.” As if focusing on them is the problem, versus the things themselves. Shouldn’t we all be mad as hell about inequity and unfairness built into systems versus trying to “kindly” smooth over thorny topics and prohibiting our children from considering how their experiences and identities have shaped them?
Being nice by offering a smile to the exhausted worker at the drive-thru who got your order wrong is undoubtedly a better practice than being mean. But when the extremists come with their homophobic, transphobic, racist, book-banning agenda, “being nice” can take a flying leap.
It’s never been more important to be nice. It’s never been less important to be nice. Both things are true. What an uncomfortable, uneven, uncertain toggle. But where else are we to live if we want life to keep getting better for more people? Kindness alone won’t get us there. In fact, it may inhibit real change.
I volunteered at our high school’s concession stand a few weeks ago. There was a big sports tournament, and between making walking tacos and ringing up bottles of Gatorade I chatted with another parent volunteer. Our conversation turned to the school board election. She told me she’d helped campaign for one of the nonpartisan people who got elected, at which point I told her that I was part of the PAC that helped defeat the Moms for Liberty candidates. “Thank you,” she said. “I so appreciated what your group did.”
“It was one of the best things I’ve ever been part of,” I said. And I wanted to add, “I hated that some people thought we were mean.” But then I remembered the end of Field of Dreams. (You knew it was always going to come back to that, right?)
Kevin Costner wants to go with the ghost ballplayers into the corn, but Ray Liotta says he isn’t invited. Costner, who built the field, is mad and says something like, “I’ve done everything you asked. I never once asked what was in it for me.” To which Liotta responds, “Is that why you did this, for you?” No. Yes. Both.
Being called “not nice” is a drop of nothingness in the bucket of terribleness that awaits when we let politics and culture wars dominate our school boards. I will bare my teeth every time they try. But, seriously, what was in that corn?
Facebook Comments