Radicalized by Kindness

I’ve built my career advocating for human rights. I can trace many of my values back to learning about Miep Gies, the woman who hid Anne Frank and her family. She has always been a hero of mine. As someone who reads history books for fun, I try to understand the present by studying the past. And honestly? It isn’t looking hopeful.

I was one of those kids who sat in history class and wondered, What would I have done? Even after building a career around that very question, I still don’t feel like I’m doing enough.

The hardest part is the compartmentalization. I’ve gotten disturbingly good at it. How do you spend your 9–5 looking at images of malnourished children, processing firsthand accounts and voice notes from medical teams in war-torn countries describing children with burned genitalia—and then switch gears to parent your own child? Some days I have less patience when my daughter whines, and I hate that about myself. I have to remind myself—remind her—how safe she is, how much she has, how lucky we are. Gratitude becomes a survival tactic.

For a long time, cruelty felt far away or too complicated. Maybe it wasn’t ever and I was just purposefully ignorant. What I once thought of as a cruel past, VERY behind us, is now America’s present.

As of this moment, I’m haunted by the image of a five-year-old boy wearing a hoodie with cartoonish ears, being separated from his parents by ICE ghouls. He should be at school learning how to read under the watchful eye of a loving kindergarten teacher or at home dressed up in some weird costume. I can’t shake it. I don’t know how to hold that kind of pain in my mind and then turn around and smile at my own daughter, pick out her clothes, and make breakfast.

I don’t know if all this compartmentalizing is breaking my brain or strengthening it. What I do know is that what we’re witnessing is horrific. Because I can only control what I do, I can only hope the work I do, the causes I support, the time I volunteer—something—makes the world better than how I entered it. But right now, it doesn’t feel like enough against the sheer force of cruelty pushing back.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how I’ve been radicalized by kindness—and thank goodness for that. I can’t escape the conclusion that anyone who supports this administration has been radicalized by cruelty, and that is where our fundamental divide lies.

And I don’t know if there’s a way back once cruelty becomes the lens.

You voted for children to be taken from their families. That’s not “law and order.” It’s moral rot.

And your Christianity isn’t Christ-ing.