A Call for Kindness

The film "Infamous" is both devastating and fantastic. It induces that rush that says "look what you've been missing your entire life. You've missed the point until now."

What I mean is that the world is both more terrible and complicated than we care to imagine. But also, it turns out that sadness and humanity can even be found in--not all--but some, a few, murderers and criminals. What killer Perry Smith was missing, Infamous posits, was love. Until Capote, he had not been loved, it's as fundamental as that. What the film didn't hit on, and Philip Seymore-Hoffman's version of these events did manage to tap into, was the fact that Truman could have easily been Perry in an alternate future. The two had similar backgrounds--broken households, homosexuality, their mothers committed suicide. Had Truman not been recognized for his art, who knows what he could have become?

Criminals, prisoners, wrong-doers, transgressors, (Raskolnikov too) deserve compassion, understanding, the careful sympathy of a writer. Being callous and simple-minded as we are, we see a prisoner tortured and sweep him away as guilty of terrorism. If waterboarding is being used on him, he must be guilty, we reason stupidly. We never afforded them a chance, a trial, anything. And meanwhile the voice of the privelaged few, miss misinformation, the praying mantis of death Ann Coulter laughs at waterboarding, sweeps it aside as "putting a caterpillar in a jail cell."

The problem is, and always has been, the lack of empathy in the world. And don't just dismiss me as a silly little idealist from the wrong decade. I understand reality somewhat.

There are those who are genuinely cynical and apathetic, who could be killers themselves, who will always agree with capital punishment and torture of prisoners, and who will never understand the gay cause, or the feminist cause, or any cause aside from their own cause--something akin to the reinstatement of the confederacy. Now why is it that those KuKlux sociopaths are the voice of the American people? How is it that a few psycopaths and self-interested corporatists managed to fog up everybody's judgement?

People have always liked superiority. To subjugate some lesser being, torture him and dehumanize him is very masses, very Nazi.

So why do I still have hope? Why do I believe there is right and wrong when clearly the world is driven by have and have-not? Why do I believe in anything at all?

Because as a good friend told me recently: it feels too good to be good and too bad to be bad for people to be, at their core, evil. I have to believe that the American people will see torture as wrong and do something about it. I can only attempt to appeal to their Christian core: that inescapable fact of Jesus' love! Therein is my hope! The masses can never escape the goodness of Christ. And if not Christ than Boccaccio: "Umana Cosa" it's a "human thing to take compassion on your fellow man."

Watch "Infamous," watch "Milk," read stories, listen to people you never listened to before. Talk to a homeless person. What can you lose? What can you lose by listening to new stories? Go! Find kindness in your heart for your fellow man, and you might find your life is worth living. Otherwise you're just dust, for the wind to carry away into oblivion, you life amounts to nothing.