Kindness and Peace

22 November 2023

Is peace your profession?

I was much younger when I walked through the base exchange in San Antonio, the gateway to the Air Force, isolated from my also much younger wife who had just had our second child, a daughter a few months prior to me entering BMT. In my flight I was known as "old man Harris," being significantly older than most of the other trainees. I had put my career as a staff accountant at a decent health care firm on hold to enjoy , and here I was looking at coins to buy to hold true to a military tradition of always carrying around one; lest I be required to buy a round. As I flipped through the rack looking at different coins with differing insignias and slogans, I found one coin that was plain in dull silver color with the imprint of a globe with the sub-inscription of "Peace is our Profession," and "Eternal Vigilance is the Price of Freedom" inscribed across the top. I knew that this was the slogan that I wanted for me and my family. Over my career I have often pondered on if my actions were leading toward more peace in the world or less, and by extension if the world would be more peaceful for future generations. A key finding that I have discovered is that kindness leads to peace. Recent events have lead me to ponder more on what does it mean to be kind?

Let me give an example that most of us may be familiar with, you are leading a work meeting over zoom with several coworkers. You set the start time and only half of your coworkers are on the call. Is is kind to go ahead and start the meeting, there are half of your coworkers who have gone through the effort of being on time to your meeting, or do you postpone one minute and see if a few more are going to 'hop' on the call? Let's imagine that you are in the camp that decided to go ahead and postpone starting the call for just one minute. The minute comes and goes and no one else has hopped on. Should you wait another minute, should you start, or should you cancel the meeting? Maybe you decide to wait another minute, and some of your colleagues who went through the trouble of being on time are now feeling like you are not being so kind to them, and so some decide that they would now like to leave your meeting and they leave the call. Now, two minutes have passed and no one else has joined your call and some colleagues have left and you have less people on the call than when you started. Now you are facing difficult questions, less than half your coworkers are on the call, maybe more will join momentarily, maybe more will drop, do you cancel and reschedule for another day, do you wait longer, do you start? If you are anything like me, you are probably reading this thinking, your next decision should be based on an understanding of the climate, work environment of your colleagues, and the individual personalities of your colleagues.  This is to say that selecting the 'correct' or most kind course of action to take is completely dependent on the effort that has gone into understanding the situation of the colleagues you are now interacting with and understanding that the kind actions for some will undoubtedly be unkind for a select number of other colleagues.  

Kindness requires effort! This is not all, kindness is also based on results. Kindness at times is unkind; or as the classical Tao Te Ching text opens with  "道可道非常道."  Perhaps you knew that a handful of your colleagues liked to stop at Dutch Bros/Scooter's/Peet's on the way in and may only be a few minutes late and you knew that one of them had something of value to add to this particular meeting, well then, it may be in everyone's best interest to go ahead and wait. So you made the decision to wait, but in this scenario, the group ended up running into a longer line than usual and did not make your meeting. Therefore, your kind intentions turned out to be unkind to everyone as you waited and individuals left frustrated with the situation. 

This shows there is the need for common rules and bounds to kindness. It is said that rule of law without kindness is cruelty, and kindness without rule of law is chaos. It is however easier to undo kindness than it is to undo cruelty to a point. At some point chaos becomes its own kind of cruelty and the only way to show kindness is to reinstate peace, often with a period of perceived cruelty. It is only when there is a common understanding of rules that kindness can again be given. 

Back to the example, if over time, I continue to wait for everyone to dial in before starting, eventually my colleagues may feel that being later will lead to waiting less for others. Eventually my meetings will not be able to occur due to the chaos of individuals calling in only at the very end of the meeting. At this point the only correction is to start the meeting right on time and cruelly cut out individuals causing chaos to my meeting. Slowly, as individuals realize that the rule of being on time is being ruthlessly enforced, they will start joining on time. 

In International Relations the effort to understand others and shape the rule of law is a type of diplomacy. The applied knowledge, understanding, and preparation or simply the wisdom of when to be kind is a type of brinkmanship. Sometimes, just sometimes we get lucky and peace prevails. Diplomacy allows for Kindness, Brinkmanship allows for lasting Peace!