By TERRY STAWAR
Calculating your net worth is a rather sobering experience. You may only do this exercise a few times in your life — like when you’re applying for a major loan, planning for retirement or entering a nursing home. To calculate your net worth, you add up all your assets (the current value of all your possessions) and then you subtract all your liabilities (mostly money you owe). Whatever is left over is your net worth. It’s easy to look at this number and despair, wondering, “Is this all I’ve accomplished in my life?”
Unfortunately we can’t compute the more meaningful aspects of our life, as easily as we can our monetary worth. For example, how can you establish the value of people like Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa or Clara Barton? Some people are truly rich in children, friends or relationships. For many people, money is a convenient way to keep score in life. However, even the wealthiest among us, Bill Gates, has in recent years shifted from trying to expand his fantastic material worth, to building up his social value, through the humanitarian works of his foundation.
Shouldn’t we all be looking closer at things such as good works, or maybe more simply, the kindness that people express throughout their lives? Kindness and civility appear especially passé these days. Depression era comic strip heroine Mary Worth once expressed her philosophy of life in one simple sentence: “In every situation, I always try to do the kindest thing possible.”
Although often seen as a bit stodgy and dated, this comic strip is still running in many newspapers across the country. The strip’s current writer Karen Moy describes Mary’s perennial appeal saying “She’s always been a force of compassion and wisdom, someone you can rely on. Mary doesn’t change. She’s just a good-hearted, helpful person.”
We all say we want to be good-hearted, helpful people. We also insist that we want others to extend kindness and civility, but our behavior belies this. We have to face the fact that we often find civility boring, and it is conflict that really grabs our attention. We watch and listen to bombastic politicians, talk show hosts, and reality television to see the fireworks, not dreary cooperation. Like watching a train wreck, conflict appeals to our baser instincts, in the way some people follow ice hockey just to see the fights or auto races to witness the crashes.
The lack of kindness and civility, often gets attention and reinforcement. We see it in our everyday encounters, on the job, in stores and restaurants, especially in traffic and parking lots, and even in our churches and synagogues, where you would think we should know better. Even if we are not being overtly cruel, we constantly miss opportunities to show affirmative kindness to others.
In the larger world, we see this lack of civility in sports, entertainment, and especially politics. The South Carolina congressman, who recently heckled the president, reaped a windfall of almost $3,000,000 in political contributions for his show of incivility (his likely opponent will receive about half that amount in backlash contributions). Of course, we have a tradition of even more extreme behavior. In 1856, another South Carolina congressman, beat Senator Charles Sumner senseless, with his walking stick, because he disagreed with one of Sumner’s speeches. This incident took place openly in the U.S. Senate Chambers, the equivalent, at the time, of being nationally televised.
Alaskan columnist Dave Differ says that there may be a model for civility for us just to the North.
He says, “In Canada, there is a complete lack of understanding of the American political concept of ‘completely destroying a village in order to save it.’”
He says that, unlike Canada, American political discourse has regressed to the point that it is almost exclusively about fear — especially the fear that the other side is going destroy your way of life and everything you hold dear. No longer being capable of affirming things, we are only capable of being “afraid.”
John F. Kennedy maintained that civility is not a sign of weakness. It does not mean suppressing your opinions or being a doormat. Many times being truly kind requires tremendous courage and the toughest of decisions and actions.
Actually it is easier for us be aggressive, critical or coldly indifferent. We have to remind ourselves that kindness is free, but of immeasurable benefit. My wife Diane says she remembers being in the examination room waiting for our pediatrician, a very sweet man everyone called Dr. Jack.
On the bulletin board was a poster that said, “A smile doesn’t cost you anything.”
Dr. Jack, who practiced what he preached, is the one who told us during a routine checkup that we had an “A+ baby.” Almost 30 years later this small act of kindness resonates in our memory.
Mark DeMoss, the owner of a public relations firm in Atlanta, Ga., has recently kicked off what he calls “The Civility Project,” www.civilityproject.org, a secular and non-partisan national campaign to extend kindness and civility throughout the country, especially towards people with whom we disagree.
As an evangelical Christian, DeMoss found the pervasive lack of civility in modern life very disturbing. On his Web site he says that the desire to extend graciousness, kindness, and civility may stem from diverse sources, although he personally is “motivated by biblical teachings, such as, “Let all that you do, be done in love.”
Regardless of your reasons for wanting more kindness and civility in modern life, DeMoss is asking all of us to take the pledge — the Civility Project’s Pledge, that is. The three part Civility Pledge is simple and to the point:
(1) I will be civil in public discourse and behavior;
(2) I will be respectful of others, whether or not I agree with them; and
(3) I will stand up and call out incivility, whenever I see it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said that “There can be no high civility without a deep morality.” To be civil and respectful does require a sense of morality, but to stand up and call out incivility, takes deep moral courage as well.
So in these hard economic times, when monetary worth has nosedived, perhaps we can feel a little better by remembering and practicing the philosophy of Mary Worth.
Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D., lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring the local community mental health center in Jeffersonville. He can be reached at tstawar@lifespr.com or 812-206-1234. Checkout his Welcome to Planet-Terry podcast at www.lifespr.com/podcast.
