Maybe 'being kind' is important right now

Women are told this is a 'gendered' message. But kindness has never been more needed

Renee Good and Alex Pretti

OK, before we start. I understand the underlying principles behind telling women to ‘be kind’, and I get it when I hear women say, ‘fuck being kind’. Firstly, I am a woman. So I know how the entire universe leans on us and exploits our ‘caring nature’, all the bloody time. I know how they use ‘be kind’ against us any time we try to assert our boundaries or say, no, stop, enough. I know. I watch them do it to you and of course they do it to me.

So yes, I really do get how this ‘be kind’ idea can be weaponised against women in particular, and that’s not what I want to do today.

But I guess what I do want to do is ask a collective, “Are you ok?”.

Because in this world where many of us have had to fight our ‘be kind’ social conditioning in order to stand up for women’s rights, and stop getting pushed around and talked over, and hold the line, I do worry a bit that some of us have hardened our hearts, a little too much.

Twitter / X - once a creative, humorous, marketplace of ideas - has become a harsh and toxic landscape. Spend too long in this landscape and some of this harsh toxicity starts to rub off on you. Verbal attacks, mockery and bullying are normalised. So you end up feeling, if you can’t beat them, join them. Dog eat dog. Vicious assaults on anyone you disagree with. Take no prisoners. Or, as they say on the streets of Minnesota right now, comply or die.

It’s really hard to understand how some people can watch the films of Renee Good and Alex Pretti being shot dead and feel anything but horror. I’m aware of the arguments, I’ve read many of them carefully, and my mind hasn’t changed, because I’ve watched the videos of both of their killings and I feel they were inexcusable. Sorry but telling me, ‘she didn’t follow the police officer’s direction’, ‘she clipped him with her car’, ‘he had a gun’, ‘he was there to make trouble’, etc etc, just doesn’t make the slightest difference to my position. You don’t shoot your citizens in broad daylight on the streets except in exceptional circumstances, and for me that means a threat to life, or a perceived threat to life, neither of which apply to Good, who was shot as she smiled from her vehicle by a man who called her a ‘fucking bitch’, and Pretti, who was shot ten times in the back whilst pinned to the ground.

When I see anyone publicly defend these killings I feel they have fallen for the politics of division, and the ruthless unkindness and lack of tolerance that Trump specialises in, and that the world is currently steeped in. We know humans are capable of such tribalism, and of hating and othering certain groups so fervently that they will happily approve of, celebrate or even participate in their death. History is full of such stories, so it would be foolish to think we are immune, no matter how ‘kind’ we may think we are. In this mad mad world we currently inhabit, we all have to watch for these traits in ourselves, and if we find ourselves thinking, “Yes, they killed him / her!”, it might be time to step away from the internet for a while, or from whatever group of people are inciting us to let go of our humanity.

When we watch a video of someone being shot - something that until recently, humans weren’t able to do - our reaction should be horror. That is the only normal reaction to seeing another human, or even an animal, die in front of our eyes. Even if that person was in the midst of committing the worst atrocities, we should feel something. A sadness that it came to that for that person. A question over what led them to that awful point. An query into what might have needed to change in the world to prevent their actions. A thought for their parent or child. No matter what the person we see being gunned down was doing, or about to do, even if we see that person as ‘evil’, some part of us should feel sadness and distress.

Seeing strangers on the internet failing to have the normal response to watching a human execution is one thing, but seeing people you’ve met and shaken hands with do so is much much worse. In the past couple of weeks Graham Linehan has come out swinging for ICE, calling JD Vance’s tweet about Renee Good’s death a ‘bullseye’, and tweeting other unpleasant things about the shootings and the related politics I’m not even going to do him the honour of sharing here. I’ll admit, I’ve had my reservations about ‘Glinner’ in the past, but others have told me, ‘He’s a hero’, ‘He speaks up for women’, and that the stuff he comes out with that veers a little bit too far into transphobia for my money, is ‘needed’ (one of the tweets he got arrested for, in which he implied trans people smell bad, being a good example).

In fact, Linehan has been very ‘unkind’ in much of what he’s said, but women have nevertheless been grateful to him. I’ve seen this phenomenon before, where women fall over themselves with gratitude when a man does something hundreds of women are already doing and somehow gets beatified, just like when men are praised endlessly for being ‘hands on dads’ because they change one nappy or do a school run. Maybe if Linehan had been female we would have been more critical of his approach, and maybe that might have been a good thing. Now we’ve ended up with one of the loudest and most public ‘gender critical’ voices having what seems to be either a very hard heart, or some kind of ulterior motive for veering to the extreme right in the USA, a country he has recently made his new home. Either way, he discredits the women who don’t share this extremism or this callousness in the face of the public death of a fellow human, but who have simply been quietly working away to preserve women’s rights.

It’s not just Linehan who has expressed some worrying views of late: there are other gender critical women and self proclaimed feminists who have supported him or share his political perspective. Like Linehan, their views play into the hands of those who have always said feminists with an understanding of the importance of sex and reality are simply bigots and fascists, getting money from the right and wanting to see a return to hardline conservative values etc, which, mostly, could not be further from the truth. If you are a moderate in this movement (like me), you face a choice at the moment to either distance yourself from the extremists, who then attack you (as I’ve experienced) or leave altogether and focus on other issues.

I think all of us (and I include myself in this) need to be very careful right now not to get desensitised to the extreme imagery we are all seeing online, and not to get simultaneously pulled into more and more extreme vortices of viewpoints, where the normalisation of violence somehow feeds our panic and drives us further and further away from our moral compass. Are you ok? Have you hardened your heart? Do you find yourself beginning to hate certain people or groups? Or maybe you care too much, feeling deeply invested in causes or situations you have no direct experience of? These are all symptoms of the internet madness, and there are two good antidotes.

1. step outside, breathe, look at nature.

2. be kind

As in, get back in touch with your kindness. Reconnect with it. Ask yourself, am I OK? What am I feeling? Am I feeling? Who is this person I just watched a video of, how are they the same as me, can I imagine their home, can I picture them having a hug with their mum, what would we talk about over a beer, how can we fix this?

Let your heart feel, and don’t stop caring, even about those you disagree with.

Now is one of those times in history when remembering to be kind really could make all the difference.

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