"He Has a Right to Criticize, Who Has a Heart to Help."
Abraham Lincoln's observation should guide who we listen to, how we decide, and what we do.
I have always been frustrated by the American tendency to follow bullshitters on any side of an issue or election. Whether they be televangelists preaching “God will make you rich,” phony populists like Donald Trump ripping off Ronald Reagan’s “Make America Great Again.” or neo-liberal promise-everything-do-nothing Democrats insisting they will “put the adults back in charge!” (umm…NOT!)
What do all these lying individuals and the special interests they serve have in common? They do not give an ACTUAL crap about you or the world. They claim to “feel your pain” (I am looking at you, Bill Clinton) and then they go to Davos to pal around with billionaires, concentrate power, and trash the planet. What happens to people who DO demonstrate a heart, like say a Bernie Sanders or a Marianne Williamson or a Jimmy Carter? They get immediately sidelined as naive or untenable. Yet what do we actually get by electing those who are “respected” for nothing other than their ability to lie-promise?: A social and economic hangover and a worse situation.
So why do we keep elevating these people? Why do we act on this irrational belief that people without any discernible heart will have our best interests “at heart.”
I think it goes to the immaturity of an American public weaned on John Wayne and lone avenger movies. They’d rather have either a tough mommy (think Margaret Thatcher) or daddy figure (think Ronald Reagan) or at least some guy who promises to screw over the people you don’t agree with. You see this prejudice in inappropriate terms like “strong-man” dictators, who are the most emotionally fragile and brutal people on the planet. “Heart” is generally considered naive. And yet it was one of our greatest, savviest, and most compassionate presidents, Abraham Lincoln, who came up with the quote for the title and who paid with his life for his effort to end slavery.
Why do we continually tolerate and even fanatically support a tribal, primal inversion of true human strength from empathy to callousness and even glee at denigrating others? We put Martin Luther King, Jr. on a pedestal, and then we elect the equivalent of Lex Luthor (Superman’s arch-foe) to the highest office in the land. To make matters worse, we react to the excesses of weak-men-pretending-to-be-strong, by electing cowardly, bureaucratic, corporate butt-kissers like Joe Biden. If a Thomas Jefferson or a Harriet Tubman came to prominence, I bet we’d cynically find a reason to why they could not be considered for national leadership, even though they are by far the most qualified— both morally and in their ability to truthfully and effectively represent the interests of the common person.
In past essays I asserted that I would not vote for a heartless Trump or a heartless Biden if they ran against each other in the next presidential election. I would write in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. That man has a BIG heart both in terms of compassion and in terms of courage. His million-selling book The Real Anthony Fauci was essentially erased by Big Tech and legacy corporate media. He has endured an enormous amount of blackballing, and yet he rises each day and works from his heart to criticize the powers that be and push for a healthier alternative. We have that same power to make sure our own deeper care for others steps forward, along with a nose for truth, and a will to heal social animosity. So what is stopping us?
Nothing.
We either follow critique with a heart to help, as Lincoln asserts, or we have no business complaining about our situation. In a world of virtual virtue, is it time we re-embodied real-life, active virtue— compassion, creativity, and courage. And it is a failure or our real-life virtue that has led us to where we are. We have been led by the pied-piper of an alleged self-interest that asks the worst and weakest of us. And then we have enshrined that lack of character as “human nature.” From this surrender to the worst of us, it is a short leap to claim a responsibility-free moral superiority over “stupider” others, a virtue of the MIND without virtue of the hand or heart.
Academia has this snobbish habit— exemplified in endless critique which leaves all the “helping” (i.e. creating a better world) to the messy plebes. Book after book gives brilliant analyses to problems and precious few pages to workable ways to address and direct past problems toward health and lasting solutions. Now with the advent of social media, this morass has become further mired in a sea of inconsequentiality, random subjectivity, shallowness, and distraction in which no measure of value emerges except one’s own unexamined preferences.
In this race to the moral substance bottom we see discussion and attention concentrated on gender-free bathrooms and what pronouns to use with “non-binary” genders, and precious little to the ravages of poverty and the demolition of the education and well-being of disadvantaged children in the Covid shutdown. We are like cats with a laser pointer. We know there is something more important, but we just can’t seem to quit responsibility-free, sanity-free complaint and gossip. We have met decadence, and it is us— banal decadence.
It’s time to get back to basics. What is most important? What does it mean to have a “heart for help”?
Care for each other more than fear for ourselves: Enough of the hysteria about one’s own exaggerated survival and the danger of others— people wearing masks outside, people talking about an “epidemic of the unvaccinated, firing people from jobs based on informed choices not to vaccinate, fear of Trump, contempt for immigrants supposedly taking jobs no one else wants. All this is crap. Can you actually help a working class Trump supporter who has been thrown out of a job? Can you actually have the courage to realize that the “epidemic” of prejudice against those who choose differently is more toxic than the alleged threat to your well-being they pose?
Welcome the differences of others as spices of life, rather than signs of depravity: Yes, this means welcoming trans-people as fully-fledged citizens, but it does NOT mean participating in a rush to surgically alter children because of a struggle with gender. Allowing children to feel differently and honor struggles to build their own identity seems much healthier and heart-ful than surgically removing biological diversity. Maybe one is not in the “wrong body.” Maybe we just need to fashion society that allows a person of whatever body to be themselves, thus freeing up and diversifying expression.
Be compassionate with struggle, our own and others: With this relentless emphasis on “success,” where failure and struggle is deemed to be a black mark, let’s flip the script. Let’s honor those who exhibit emotional vulnerability. (I did this in one psychology class by actually giving bonus points to those who were emotionally honest and vulnerable in their examples.) Let’s call out those who “succeed” at the expense of others.
Be willing to work and put your hands where your mouth is: Whenever you find something to complain about, either actually contribute to the betterment of that situation or keep your critique very brief and matter-of-fact. No one is obligated to accept your critical “pearls of wisdom” if you have no intended skin in the game. Enough of the endless “committees to study a problem.” These are simply ways to kick the can down the road. Develop and enact actual projects and efforts meant to directly reach and help others.
Don’t let bureaucratic, regulatory, or legal processes overcome common sense and real compassion: You want to help the homeless or kids struggling in school, then find a way for them to help each other with your help. Don’t be malcontent OR a savior. Be a brother or sister. Be a caring, competent citizen. If the city code insists that a 500,000 dollar elevator be put in a reclaimed home for homeless people to be up to city code, and the choice is between providing a home for able-bodied homeless or providing no home at all, make the sensible exemption.
What are your ideas? Include them in the comment section!
"He Has a Right to Criticize, Who Has a Heart to Help."
So reasoned. Thank You.
DiLorenzo's reading appears to be at odds with basic logic and historical facts. By his interpretation and logic, LIncoln merely used the cover of anti-slavery to wage a federalist take over of states, preventing them from seceding, as is their right (according to his logic). No, states AREN'T countries. Nor were they conceived that way as DiLorenzo contends. That is his theory and it is a bad theory, not supported by historical evidence. The "states rights" rhetoric was post-hoc apology for slavery under the rubric of economic "self-determination" built on the back of an enslaved population. If DiLorenzo is to be believed, Lincoln was actually an inveterate racist, who "freed the slaves" to create a distraction from his tyrannical impulses. This would make no sense at all, under any strategy or logic. That would be like George Wallace eliminating poll taxes, and greasing the wheels of black voter registration in order to get black votes. If he were to do so, he would lose his white votes. What Lincoln did was massively complex, contentious, and nuanced, and he paid for it with his life. That cannot be argued. That is historical fact. HIs murderer was a committed racist and supporter of the "Southern cause". What cause was that? States rights? Sure, states "rights" to own human flesh so they could make money not only off the backs for former African but their owned children as well, as if they were cattle. That fact is being glossed over by DiLorenzo's revisionist attempt to redeem white nobility. I don't buy it, and history doesn't support it.