I keep coming back to the Five Losing Strategies Lace introduced us to by presenting Terry Real’s work as foundational to our community. Very especially the first one: Being Right.

We’re so used to living, I’M so used to living in a world where being right is how you win, not how you lose. Religion, entertainment media, social circles, all kinda define being right as being better, right? Sometimes it’s explicit, sometimes it’s implicit, but “better” isn’t the end of it. That “better” is followed by “than.” And “than” is kinda frequently followed by “them.”

And there it is: there’s where the W we crave becomes the L we don’t want to take. We lose. We lose a lot, or we lose a little at a time on the way to a lot, when we start directing our thoughts and words and actions and energies toward positioning ourselves as the right,  superior WEs relative to the wrong, inferior THEMs.

I’ll go a little farther and say that we often work much harder toward being perceived and acknowledged as being right than actually BEING right. And demonstrating allegiance to a “right” group is a great (that is, easy) way to bolster our optics without action. Which lets us be morally lazy, wherein we lose again: we lose our ethical muscle mass and tone. We lose our quick reflexes toward just praxis.

Okay, so what? What does any of this have to do with the present state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Or maybe that’s as obvious to you as it seems to me? Still, it’s worth spelling out.

And this is hard for me. I am a person who delves after facts and intensely desires to have the “right” of those facts. For most of my life, without interrogating this about myself, I have valued being right over being kind. Kind seemed simplistic, a given because I was of course a good person… Kindness didn’t seem of much value in winning through rightness.

Maybe “kind” is too trite, not a robust enough word for what I mean. I mean a muscular, reflexive, uncompromising value for the life, well-being, humanity, of all humans. Lace called it Hesed, a concept borrowed from the Judaic tradition. But kind is a tidy, quick word, and I’m too wordy as it is. I’ll keep using it. And remind myself that simple isn’t simplistic.

Okay, well, doesn’t the Venn diagram of being right and behaving kindly have a lot of overlap? Kind is such a right way to be and do! But the losing strategy of being right… I guess it’s about which circle you prioritize being in. As I, you, we, determine and voice what we believe about what’s going on right now in Gaza, which do we prioritize? Being right, being in the right, being on the right side of history, aren’t these more pertinent than kindness when it comes to war?

Maybe so… if I think of being “kind” as being “nice”, like it seems we usually do. We’ve talked here in the past about the difference between “nice” and “kind,” nice being potentially more about appearance than real being. But true kindness, true, deep value for human life and wellbeing, is about action, not seeming. About protesting and safeguarding when we see life and wellbeing threatened, about reducing and mitigating harm. Which can’t always be done with a polite smile and pleasant words.

Niceness doesn’t have much of a place in war. I would argue that kindness should be on the very frontlines.

And I would argue that, if you look at international laws like the Geneva Conventions, what looks right, what looks just, to humanity as a whole, or at least what we want to be perceived as thinking of as right and just… a lot of that has respect for humanity, has kindness at its core. Things like not attacking non-combatants, not torturing prisoners of war. These are our attempt to square the realities of what happens when deadly conflict arises with true value for all humans. To me, that is kindness doing its job.

This is where I start to expand my thinking outward from the obvious ways in which I can be violently and unkindly right in my facts as I wade into expressing where I stand on the current conflict, the ways I need to strive to prioritize kindness, especially when so many people are actively suffering from harm because of their heritage, family history, or even just their perceived ethnicity. Being right is not just a losing strategy for existing as one among a community of humans.

This need to be right at the expense of respect for and kindness to whatever “them” we think is wrong… it’s violent. It dehumanizes. It sets higher value on the humanity of one “side”, at the expense not only of armed combatants and violent terrorists, but also the uninvolved and even unwilling people the conflict is “for”.

And the more we need to be right in order to justify the ways we fail to be kind, the more we need to dehumanize and define as “wrong” those we fail in kindness toward.

To me, this shows how, in and of and for itself, being right can be a horribly wrong way to be. But we cling to it so hard. As individuals, as nations, as a human world.

So, I’m not Israeli or Palestinian. I’m not even Jewish or Muslim. (White European Christians are also currently located in Israel and Gaza.) But I am a US citizen, and our country has a hand in the past and present of the Middle East, and will continue to have a hand in its future. And I’m human. Like John Donne wrote centuries ago, “Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”

So yes, it’s not just my place, it is imperative that I take and defend a position, and speak and act and contribute and vote from that position, as a citizen of the world and of the USA. 

The part the United States played in the founding and fostering of Israel was not disinterestedly kind. (If we’d cared about kindness, we wouldn’t have denied asylum to so many European Jews during the war.) Establishing Israel, for us (US) has always been about having (even manufacturing) an ally in an area where Russia was also cultivating (manufacturing?) alliances during the Cold War… an area that also just so happens to have vast petroleum reserves. That is too long a story for what I’m trying to say here. And getting into it now is too much, again, about who is, has been, “right”. But I think it’s been important in developing my own position. I do hope you delve a bit in informing yours.

The point I’m trying to support here is that I as an individual have had to work extra to value kindness over being right, and I don’t think I’m alone. And individuals like me, you, us, we make up communities, nations, a world… a future. I believe violent death, enslavement, harm, has throughout human history been perpetrated and prolonged in the sometimes mass, manic need to be right. Being right is considered the winning value at all levels of human society right now.

And I believe that can change, because I believe humans can do anything. After all… Lots of people and nations came together and created the Geneva Conventions. The thing is, it isn’t one and done. We have to keep working at it, because apathy and unkindness and resting on rightness is so much easier.

So, for me, right now, that means I acknowledge that the violence of Hammas terrorists needs to be stopped, and the violence toward Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military is inexcusable (and potentially counterproductive) even toward that goal. 

It means I say clearly and often that anti-Semitism is evil, and so is Islamophobia: both have no place, no rightness, are bereft of kindness, and they bob around in the white supremacist soup I swim in, so I must be doubly careful. The oppression and persecution of the Jewish people throughout human history is a blot and stain on human history, right up through the horrors of World War II to the present. The Crusades were too. And the state of Israel was created then expanded into land that real human people already called home, and those people have been made less human and given fewer rights, their lives and wellbeing deprioritized and even attacked, in their own homeland, since Israel’s founding. 

It means I support the calls for cease fire, “humanitarian pauses”, any and all efforts to protect the lives and wellbeing of people just trying to live those lives well in the immediate here and now as bombs rain down. It means I contribute to humanitarian aid organizations. 

It means I vote for US leaders who call for and promote paths to peace that are kind to (that is, show value for the humanity of) every single person who has to live along those paths. I can’t elect politicians in Gaza and Israel, and the which-side-is-more-right game is what keeps us here, so that’s the best I think I can do for now, based on what I feel is kind, and… thus what I believe is right.

And here’s the thing. If I base who I say I want to be on being right, I will resist with irrational fury any suggestion I am wrong. And let’s be really honest. I may very well, and very easily, BE WRONG. But if I’m not too invested in the identity I’ve formed on wrong notions, the good news is, I can also learn, change, grow, and be righter and righter over time. If I base who I am on being kind, I can strive to learn and grow in rightness, AND ALSO cause less harm and do more active good throughout my learning process. A process I expect will be lifelong, and not always linearly right-ward.

So I think the change our world needs starts with displaying and teaching the value of kindness. And I think, appropriately enough, kindness is the foundation of Terry Real’s Five Winning Strategies. Especially the last: Cherish Each Other.