OPINION: In 2024, let’s resolve to be kinder to one another

Recently, commentator David Brooks wrote an article for The Atlantic magazine entitled “How America Got Mean.” He said he has been obsessed with two questions: “Why have Americans become so sad?” and “Why have Americans become so mean?” Describing rising rates of mental depression as well as the deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol and suicide, Brooks noted that the percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990, and a record-high 25% of 40-year-old Americans have never been married.

A restaurant owner told Brooks that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week — something that never used to happen. A hospital’s head nurse said many of her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes have risen to their highest level in 12 years. Recent shootings and killings of Americans because of their ethnicity offer a particularly horrible example of the growth of meanness within our society.

Attempting to answer his own two questions, Brooks described a decline in organizations that offer moral education or training. He notes that about 70 years ago, a commission of the National Education Association stated that “an unremitting concern for moral and spiritual values is a top priority for education.” In addition, Brooks says there used to be a host of groups for whom interpersonal kindness and consideration were an intrinsic value. These include the YMCA, Sunday schools, and Boy and Girl Scouts.

Brooks also noted that most Americans used to be members of churches or other religious communities, saying “Mere religious faith doesn’t necessarily make people morally good, but living in a community, orienting your heart towards some transcendent love, basing your value system on concern for the under-served — those things tend to.”

Along the same lines, an important study showed that there is a clear connection between positive interpersonal relationships and good physical health. Dr. Robert Waldinger of the Harvard Medical School recently co-published “The Good Life, Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.”

Waldinger wrote that “the clear and well-substantiated lesson is that having strong social relationships has a major influence on personal health … in fact good interpersonal relationships are one of the most important determinants of good health. Relationships help us weather the stresses that are normal in our lives.” When someone annoys you. Waldinger suggests building a better relationship by asking that person a question so they will talk about their life. As he says, “Kindness is contagious.”

Conversely, so is meanness. All of us have seen increases in the volume and frequency of threats against people of Jewish and Muslim faith in our country. This unprecedented rise of antisemitism is a response to the horrors of the current war in the Middle East. It must be stopped.

In the words of Abed Ayoub, director of our nation’s Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, “This is an attack on the fundamental freedoms in this country.” He is right! Threats and attacks based on race or any other individual characteristic are fundamentally un-American.

Our democracy is founded on the fundamental premise expressed in the introduction to the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Though there have been — and will be — ongoing obstacles to overcome along the way, those famous words, written by Thomas Jefferson in 1776, remain the basic rudder that steers our American democracy. They have done so for 247 years — through slavery, unequal voting rights and much more. Now these words must steer us all through a tide of hate and discrimination.

None of us are minorities. We are all Americans, and we must do our best in small and large ways to be kind to one another.

Janet McCabe and her husband David came to Alaska in 1964. She is a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a member of Alaska Common Ground and Commonwealth North.

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