We were having a conversation in the office the other day about the recent Mr. Rogers documentary, Won't You Be My Neighbor, and it got me thinking about the buzz that surrounded the movie when it was out. I seem to remember posts here and there on Facebook where people were raving about it, and elsewhere on the internet people were talking about how much it made them cry.
At the same time I thought I saw an increase in memes relating to Mr. Rogers, and the various kindnesses and wise sayings he doled out in his years on TV. The main one is about seeing people at disasters who are helping, and to always look for the helpers - which I think is very good advice at any time.
I'm old enough to remember watching Mr. Rogers on TV, though I think as a whippersnapper I preferred Sesame Street, which was funnier and fairly anarchic for TV aimed at kids aged three and up. I thought I remembered when he went off the air, though that and his passing (in 2001 and 2003, respectively) turn out to have happened later than I had imagined.
But what got me thinking after the movie came out, and after that conversation in the office, was how the niceness of Fred Rogers seems to have taken on a political undertone.
This shouldn't be surprising, in these weirdly polarized times, when certain (*cough* rightwing *cough*) groups find depictions of the Statue of Liberty to be provocatively liberal. But when I say "political" I don't mean that the Mr. Rogers ethos has been adopted by the left - more that the need for being nice and tolerant in a quiet and low-key way seems to have become a reaction against the prevailing current of American society, which just feels more polarized along any metric or ideal you could care to mention.
So I call it radical kindness - I don't think I came up with the term, but whoever it belongs to, I take it to mean a clear attempt to be kind and friendly in situations where it would otherwise be easy to just be unpleasant. Like any such impulse, it can also sometimes go a little overboard - I remember being at a concert at Stern Grove in San Francisco last year, where a woman sitting in front of me was not only helping people climb up along her little stretch of ground where she was sitting with her friends, but was also insisting (repeatedly) slogans like how we're all in this together, or wanting to help out, or some such.
That might come off as snobbish, but I appreciated the impulse, even though I could see her patience wearing thin with all the people trying to climb past throughout the afternoon (we were listening to an orchestra play a bunch of pieces by Sibelius, so it was a fairly long concert).
And at the risk of sounding even more snobby, on the internet there seems to be a performative aspect to it, where people compete to show how much some simple (or elaborate) act of kindness that they've read about hits them in the feels.
If I'm criticizing anything about this radical kindness thing, it's that - but at the same time I don't want to criticize too hard because it just seems churlish to get annoyed at people going out of their way to be nice to others.
I guess what trips me up about this impulse, and the buzz surrounding the Mr. Rogers documentary, is how it really is a reaction - it could be the media inflating bad news to generate more clicks, or maybe things really are so bad, but it does feel like our leaders are particularly venal at the moment, and business is more cutthroat than ever, all against a backdrop of casual cruelty and environmental collapse. With that in mind, why shouldn't people - especially younger people - decide to take a stand by loudly proclaiming they're for everything Wall Street and Silicon Valley and the government seem to be ignoring?
Overall, the real negative that I can see here is that things have gotten so bad that such stances really are necessary. Lest we forget, there are concentration camps for refugee children on our southern border, and administration officials are arguing that these kids don't need soap, toothpaste or blankets.
That said, it's not just here. In Japan there's a growing group of people called hikikomori, who are effectively modern-day hermits - effectively people who have opted out of the rat race of Japanese society and refuse to leave their homes or see their families. There are also "herbivores" or "grass-eating men", who have opted out of looking for romantic partners entirely - or at least out of traditional expectations of masculinity in Japan.
But it's notable that this reaction in Japan is against a specific cultural expectation (get your salaryman job, marry someone, and do just as all other men have been doing since the end of the Second World War), whereas in the US it's against a feeling of rampant unpleasantness. Or to put it another way, hikikomori are looking for a different way of life, whereas in America we're just getting sick of people being shitty - which has never really been an expected "way of life".
So that's why I believe Won't You Be My Neighbor got so much attention when it came out, despite - or because of - the fact that Fred Rogers was an ordained minister and probably quite conservative in many ways. Though his conservatism probably manifested in quieter ways than that of today's Republicans. Much like I said last year or so, that the MeToo movement might not have gained so much traction if a person with accusations of sexual assault and harassment hadn't gained the White House, the Mr. Rogers documentary might not have gained so much traction if there weren't this sense of cruelty pervading American life right now.
Or maybe it would have been a big (ish) movie no matter who's president? Nostalgia was probably a big part of its appeal, too. Still, I think there are grounds for my argument, and I'd be interested in seeing if there really has been more thought for radical kindness since 2016.
We could use it, to be honest.
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