Latest / Many Things with Steph Libby / Time for Kindness and Love?

Transcript

Time for Kindness and Love? · Many Things with Steph Libby

I was sitting in my office this morning feeling tired and drained.
It's been a week of ups and downs.
Not professionally, not personally, but politically more bad and terrifying news every single day.
It's been a year of this and.
Now there's journalists getting arrested, leveraging a government shutdown to get more money for an American Gustavo.
But at the same time, I see stories about communities coming together, neighbors joining hands with neighbors, and I wanna be hopeful that the tides are turning.
I wanna believe that midterm elections will make a difference.
I wanna believe that bigotry won't win in the end.
When I was younger and we studied the start of the Third Reich and before the Holocaust was the Holocaust, that during the precursor activities and the precursor climate, the, the kind of stuff that we're living through right now, I had this naive idea.
That daily life in Europe stopped, that people stopped going to work, that most people stopped going out and having a life.
I knew a lot of Nazis just kept living their lives because they were rejoicing but I thought for everyone else, daily life stopped.
That was the impression I was kind of given in my history classes.
No one talked about how the people who weren't being rounded up, kept working, kept going to school, kept having dinner with friends that.
Life kind of was going on while all these horrific things were also happening.
And what I realize now because history is very much repeating itself, is that life is still being lived and it feels really, really wrong.
You can't stop completely, but it also feels so wrong to log into work.
I'm talking to clients about deadlines for server launches and what's the impact of AI on marketing and shipping costs to get signage to event it all feels so insignificant.
It really makes me question our priorities.
I'm sitting here being able to read a book today to help distract myself.
I have the luxury and the privilege to sit in my office and stare at my calendar and ask myself what I wanna accomplish in February while people are being pulled from their homes without warrants.
People are being shot in the streets.
Journalists are being arrested.
The government is trying to tamp down on people, recording and videotaping all these atrocities that are happening right in front of our eyes, insisting that what we're seeing with our eyes is not actually happening.
There's this really strange push and pull because I can't just stop my life.
Most of us can't.
We have bills to pay and mouths to feed and people to take care of, but it feels tone deaf and like I am okay with what's going on as though this is totally normal.
Even though that's absolutely not the case, and that's what fascists want.
When things feel kind of normal for some people, it makes it easier to oppress.
And I'm doing what I can, paying attention to the news, sharing and liking stories to help them get more visibility.
I'm questioning the government.
I'm not believing the lies that this government and administration touts.
I'm calling my senators, but it doesn't seem like enough, does it? It feels like our lives are in the hands of people who simply don't give a shit about us.
We're numbers on a spreadsheet.
We're tiny ponds.
In a much bigger scheme.
So all of this to say that I've had a really hard time trying to formulate any meaningful words this week, I've been isolating a bit.
It's hard not to want to completely disconnect from everyone and everything, even though I know that's a cowards move.
I knew things would get horrible.
I knew things could become this awful and horrific and dystopian.
None of what I'm seeing surprises me deep down if you've been paying attention at all for the last 10 years.
Everything that we're seeing right now was all very conceivable.
But that doesn't mean it's not shocking.
It doesn't mean it's not depressing.
It doesn't mean that it's not.
Frustrating.
It doesn't mean that it's not scary.
It doesn't mean that I ever really thought it would ever actually happen, and the worst part is it can still get so much worse.
I was gonna come on here and talk about kindness.
That's what I had planned to talk about this week, but I don't know.
I don't know it, it feels kind of moot.
But then I thought about how I believe kindness is a cure because empathy and understanding live in the realm of kindness.
When we can empathize with others, when we can feel a connection to those we think we couldn't possibly relate to, when we can appreciate someone else's experiences and point of view, bigotry and hate could fade.
Because I think bigotry is formed out of a lot of factors, how you were raised, for one, what privilege you were born with for another, but it's also a lot about fear.
Whether it's irrational fear or based on a specific experience that has been extrapolated to be become some universal judgment.
And I realized the other day that bigotry and hate has a lot to do with insecurity, especially in America.
The hate towards immigrants has a lot to do with insecurity.
A bunch of white people mostly started saying that they were gonna come take our jobs.
That was the thing I remember everyone saying for the longest time, since I was a kid before that.
But that was kind of like, for me, the thing where hate really started.
It was this insecurity.
I hate bigots.
But I also pity them.
I pity that they can't see past themselves.
I pity that they live in a world of assumptions and honestly, self-interest take the, they're gonna take my job comments.
I pity that they can't see the beauty that comes from a diverse community.
I pity that they're so uneducated that they've bought into the propaganda, and I'm not sure some of them really even understand what it is they pretend to believe and others I pity because they actually do believe it.
I pity that they don't understand what could be coming or worse they do, and I pity them for being so misguided that they think that it's a good thing.
I am conflicted because part of this journey I'm on is so much about extending kindness and grace to ourselves and to each other, to meet people with love and try to engage with the world in a loving way.
That what you put out into the world is what you get back.
Put out love.
You get love back.
Put out kindness.
You get kindness back.
And all these books I read and all these practices, I'm trying to practice tout the value and the need for meeting everyone and every day with love.
But there are also days when I'm like, not everyone deserves kindness, deserves love, deserves my understanding.
These mass people raid homes.
These people shooting innocent people, people attacking protestors, politicians on either side of the aisle, frankly, who I don't think give much of a shit about race or immigration or justice until they think it'll serve them, but who speak with such conviction in an effort to rally public support.
And then I have to stop and ask myself if I cut off love, if I reserve my empathy only for those that I agreed with.
Does that make me a mirror of the exact same thing I'm rallying against? Evil and hate starts with a lack of love and empathy.
I don't wanna perpetuate a kind of hate and evil because I think it's justified because I think I'm standing on the right side of it.
So therefore, I can hate these other people as much as they feel justification to hate people like me or, or people like my neighbors, or the people that are being dragged and separated from their families and deported.
They also think their hate is justified.
Remember that, and maybe that sounds self-righteous or naive, and I completely understand that Some people don't think pity or love have any value right now, but I personally think that cutting yourself off from love, cutting yourself off from understanding, cutting yourself off from empathy is a dangerous path to be on.
For me, it's not authentic to how I want to live my life.
It's contradiction to the things I have been learning and trying to do differently in my life.
Extending love to the world doesn't mean I'm condoning anything.
Love and empathy don't mean passivity or acceptance of harm or hate Learning to meet the world with love despite its horrors is a tall order.
It's hard.
It's definitely not easy.
Extending love doesn't mean I stop calling senators or donating money to the causes I believe in, or standing up for what I believe to be right.
It just means that I can see someone else's point of view.
Not that I am gonna jump on that point of view, not that I'm going to say you're right in thinking these things.
But I remember in college and we were learning about debate, and I wanna say it was Thomas Payne and, and to paraphrase it was basically, essentially.
In order to win a debate, in order to win an argument, in order to win a fight, you have to understand your opponent.
You have to understand what makes them tick, what makes them tick.
You have to understand where they're coming from because otherwise, how can you effectively challenge that viewpoint? If you don't know why they have that viewpoint in the first place, not that you're justifying them having that viewpoint, not that you're condoning that viewpoint, not that you're saying that their viewpoint is accurate or better or good.
It's just about understanding.
Understanding doesn't have to be acceptance.
Understanding is just that, understanding it's information.
Not living in a place of love also feels like giving up.
We're saying the bad have already won at the same time.
It's like you can't argue with crazy, right? Like, and bigotry feels like a lot of nonsense.
It's just like sometimes I, I cannot wrap my head around bigotry.
I understand why it exists for some people.
I understand why some people are hateful.
I understand why.
Some people, again, I'm not condoning it, but I understand why they've shaped that view based on experience or not.
Things they've been fed, things they've sought out all of that.
But it does feel like nonsense.
It feels like something I just cannot wrap my head around because I'm not a I, I'm not a bigot because I.
Like meeting people different for myself, because I like that America was this like, quote unquote melting pot of people.
I, I have always thought that that is what, that's what in my mind has always made America great and different from a lot of places in the world.
I bought into that idea of like different people coming together from different walks of life.
Whether you were born here, immigrated here.
And we all work together to make this place the place that everyone in the world wants to be.
And now it's like, I wish I could get out of here, but like, where would you go? But bigotry feels like a lot of nonsense.
And, and so meeting those people with love feels like, what's the point? They don't deserve it.
It's a struggle, but I hold two truths that people causing harm are still human beings shaped by fear, ignorance, and their own pain, and that their actions and propaganda and thoughts must be resisted sometimes forcefully.
I think it is possible to extend empathy, to understand why someone holds bigoted views, why they are so hateful, why they think it is okay to condone this behavior, why they are so inclined to believe everything they read.
I can extend empathy to try to understand the views they've absorbed, why they believe the dangerous rhetoric they've been fed, whether forcefully or they sought it out to understand the emotional needs those beliefs meet for them while simultaneously working against those beliefs and their consequences.
Understanding someone's humanity doesn't mean agreeing with them or letting harm continue.
Unchecked.
I'm not saying give the bigots the warm and fuzzies.
I'm not saying break bread with them.
I'm just saying what does hate get us? How does meeting hate with hate Get us anywhere? The hate I feel towards them, I don't think is actually quote unquote hate at all.
It's deeper than that.
It's so much deeper than that.
It's an overwhelming mix of grief, fear, anger, and moral outrage to injustice.
Animosity corrodes us from the inside, and that's what they want ultimately is for us to be too tired and weak to fight back.
But meeting the world with love and empathy and understanding most of the time actually makes me feel lighter.
It makes me feel energized.
It makes me feel up for it.
I don't have a lot of answers.
I have more questions than anything, but I do know this.
I want my humanity to remain intact because it's my humanity that makes me see all these horrors as just that horrors.
When we lose sight of love and kindness, we lose sight of our own humanity, and that is a terrifying prospect.
Maybe today's topic feels like a departure for this podcast.
Maybe to you it sounds like, God, I just wanted to listen to this girl blab about some random stuff and escape from literally everything that she's talking about right now.
But I guess it's important for me to remember that all these little things I'm learning and doing throughout my little corner of the world.
At some point, these behaviors and thought processes and practices need to be applied to the bigger picture.
And that's what's on my mind today.
And I realized that this is a super privileged point of view to have, but I don't know what else to do.
I can't let the hate and the fear drag me down.
If I do, I won't be capable of doing anything helpful.
It will consume me until there's nothing left.
This is part of what I can offer the world right now.
This is part of how I can show up and fight.
It's not a complete solution, but it's a start.
It's something so.
That's where I'm gonna leave it for this week.
I hope I'm able to meet more people with love and empathy throughout the coming weeks.
I am, I'm hoping that others will join me in the same, because I think it's about to become, it's always, what's the saying? Like it's always darkest.
Before the dawn, I think we were about to enter a very, very dark period in our country's history.
And I want to be someone that's bringing the love and the empathy and the kindness to the table because I do not want us to lose our humanity because in the darkest times, it's very easy to lose sight of humanity.
And when we lose that, we have nothing.
All right everyone.
Well, I will see you next week.