Yeah, I'm Nice

Hello! Welcome back! Happy new year, such as it is!

I hope you all had a wonderful Holiday season. I…did not.

I don’t want to get into the nitty gritty, but family is complicated and mine perhaps more than most. I showed up with a podium to a knife fight and everyone got good and bloody.

Last night, as I was talking to my six year old as she fell asleep, she told me that she was glad that I was gentle, and for some reason, this comment completely gutted me. I thought about her words during my fitful sleep last night, and have been reflecting on why this simple comment meant so much to me all day.

I think it is because she looked at a part of myself that I sort of resent—I am a pushover, I panic when people start raising their voices, I can’t convince the people I love to stop damaging everyone with their wanton assholism, I desperately want to seek change with consensus when nobody else wants to work together—and made it sound positive. And not just positive in a general sense, but something she appreciated rather than a weakness to be exploited.

We may be living through the age of the asshole. Or, perhaps, every age is the age of the asshole because nobody can seize a moment the way an asshole can. They are both the most awesome and powerful hero and most maligned and lowly victim of every story. What a feat! Nobody can self promote like an asshole can!

I keep thinking back to this old Carlos Mencia (where did that asshole end up?) comedy special I caught back before I had any streaming services. He finished his set with a nearly tearful recollection of how important assholes are. Fans, very non-fictitious fans, would come up to him and thank him for making fun of whatever characteristic he happened to joke about. He was the only thing keeping the world from falling apart!

No one over in gentle land bothers to brag like that. We just try to clean up the mess so no one else gets hurt. Our hero/victim asshole brethren could never accept that they made a mess, so it must have been us. And how can we convince them otherwise? Appeal to logic or shame? Is there a secret third thing you haven’t told me about?

The dawn of 2025 seems like the thick of the asshole years above and beyond the baseline levels. The most obvious incarnation is the Trumpist movement. A cornier person might say they Made America Giant Assholes. Trump may be the asshole king, but social media platforms contain multitudes of asshole fiefdoms all trying to out asshole each other. And activism, perhaps especially left activism, seems to take as axiomatic that being a destructive asshole will lead to positive change.

Do we need to have an achievable goal? Win people over to our side? Seem generally appealing? Pressure those in power rather than annoy the general populace? Make a specific request and promise to stop if a goal is reached?

No! Silence, you! The assholes are talking, and you don’t understand.

But while we may be in the age of the asshole, I think that we need gentle people more than ever. We have a lot of mess to clean up and hurt to undo, and we need to do something to overcome our natural disadvantage.

My daughter had some advice for me, for us, last night. She said that if saying “no” is too hard, we can just say “n-o” (we were never destined to make Nancy Reagan proud). And maybe that’s a place to start. It’s time to rise up…or at least maybe ignore the knots in our stomach as we make our case, adding a “but firmly” to the “gently.” Instead of disgust or disappointment and appeals to decency, we need to find another way to exert power. Maybe, when it is warranted, we should just say “f-u-c-k y-o-u, this is your mess.”