December 17, 2019 • 32 mins
On being your best self. On the least of these. On the virtues of a cup of tea.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M hm m m. Mr Rogers tried to get us
to be our best self. That's a phrase that you know,
we hear variations of it a lot now, right like
live your best life, be your best self. What we
usually mean by that now is seek pathways to your
(00:22):
own joy and the kind of self celebration you want
to experience, which I think is great and I'm a
firm believer in that self love is really radical and important.
But when we say that Mr Rogers wanted people to
be their best self, there's something about like just encouraging
(00:42):
people to be good, right, to be good and to
be kind to themselves and to other people that I
actually think is a really rare message. I don't know
who is telling children or anyone be kind, you know,
and in a way that is lived out in their example,
(01:04):
and not like moralizing or pedantic or condescending. Fred Rogers
is everywhere right now, on t shirts and calendars and
coffee mugs. There's a movie and multiple books, articles and
major magazines and of course this podcast. And it seems
to me the reason we're seeing him everywhere is that
(01:27):
we believe, collectively there's something in what he taught us
that we need right now. But are we understanding the
right thing about him and his work? Or are we
just in love with the niceness, the nostalgia, the feel good.
Not that those are bad things in and of themselves,
(01:48):
but are they enough? Is it enough to fall in
love with this idea that each of us is likable?
Is that even the right idea? Because I don't think
that's all there was to his message. I'm Carvil Wallace
and this is Finding Fred, a podcast about Fred Rogers
(02:10):
from High Heart Media and Fatherly in partnership with Transmitter Media.
Fred Rogers grew up during the Depression, through World War
Two and the Holocaust. He had seen how horrible people
could be to one another, and his show spoke to that.
(02:32):
It launched just months before Bobby Kennedy's assassination, and Fred
made a p s A in response to it, and
just a few weeks after he officially retired, he made
another p s A right after September. We've talked about
how Fred didn't want to do the announcement at all
in the face of such enormous violence and tragedy. He
(02:52):
said he couldn't see how it would do any good,
but he did it anyway. The writer and educated or
e viewing who you remember from episode two was watching
There's this video that I've watched a lot where he
addresses us as adults. You know. He's saying, sometimes I
see you all on the streets. I run into you,
(03:14):
those of you who grew up in the neighborhood, you know,
And when I see you, I tell you, just like
I did when you were very small, that I'm just
so proud of you, you know, and I like you
just the way you are. A lot of people who
heard Fred's p s A took comfort in his message
look for the helpers, but Eve heard something else. He
(03:38):
is talking to you as an individual, but now as
an adult, and that's his opportunity to say something else
or to like break this character. And the thing he
chooses to say is I still see you. I'm still
proud of you and see the child in you. And
I think that when we talk about forgiving people and
not believing in monsters, to me, that's what much of
(03:59):
that amount to is knowing that everybody was somebody's child.
You know, who has been hurt, or who's been afraid,
or who's been trying their best to learn, or who's
been trying to be resilient in a difficult situation. We've
talked about what it means to do what Fred did,
listen carefully and speak to the children inside people. But
what are we supposed to do when the child is
(04:21):
afraid and acting out, throwing tantrums and destroying things. What
are we supposed to do when the child inside other
people makes them dangerous and destructive? And when that's making
us feel afraid like we want to lash out and
hurt people who are hurting us. What are we supposed
to do then? And who can show us how to
(04:42):
act in a world like this one here today? My
mom told me all the time and continues to tell
me that you know, your responsibility is to be a lightbringer,
and your job is to be a door opener, not
a gatekeeper. And all of us have that grandma, that neighbor,
(05:04):
that uncle, that guy on the corner store. You know,
I remember like riding the train with my mom and
we didn't have a car, and going down to the
train station and there was this South Asian man who
ran the convenience store in the train station, and you know,
whenever we went to get on the train, he would
give me like a small caramel square, you know, those
like little cubes, just like a no brand, no name,
(05:27):
like caramel cube. And those are the small moments as
a kid that I just remember feeling like, oh, I'm somebody.
Somebody told me that I was special today. And I
think that message can come from a lot of messengers.
And definitely race and class and culture and religion and
geography and all those things can make it harder here,
but it usually comes through loud and clear if the
(05:48):
person really cares about you. There are helpers everywhere, people
who really see us and are kind to us, and
there are also people who show us how to be helpers,
who model it for us. My paternal grandfather, incidentally, is
(06:10):
a white man who is a lay Presbyterian minister. He
grew up on a really small farm in the depression
in rural Illinois, and in so many ways reminds me
of Mr Rogers. He has a uniform like Mr Rogers.
He just wears like short sleeve button down shirts in
(06:31):
the same way that Mr Rodgers always wears his card agaan.
But my grandfather has children and grandchildren that have lived
just radically different lives than him, you know, in terms
of like race, class, culture, interests. Paul just like everything
that you can think of, and he just is such
(06:53):
a deeply, deeply kind and caring person. My uncle married
a really some woman who didn't grow up in the
church or anything like that, and I remember she said
when she met my grandfather, she was like, Oh, this
is the first real Christian I've ever met, Like, this
is the first person that actually they say they're a
Christian and it means that they like do all this
(07:13):
stuff that Jesus said to do right. And he's always
just made me feel completely unconditionally loved and accepted. But
I also see him treat other people that way in
a way that makes it clear that it's not just
about me being his grandchild, but what he believes about
the world. And going to visit my grandparents and just
meeting random people that were staying in their house temporarily
(07:37):
because that's what they needed in the moment also made
a big impression on me as a kid that I
could come and meet somebody and just be told like, oh,
you know, they needed to stay here for for this
period of time because of X y Z. And I
think that that idea of an open home quite literal
in in both the case of my grandfather and the
case of Mr Rogers, right like, I think that's something
(07:59):
also that's incidental that we're in Mr Rogers's house. He's
welcoming us into his house. Eve's grandfather showed her one
way to be open and generous in a world that
seems hell bent on the opposite. I don't I don't
identify as a Christian um, but I think that even
though I don't identify that way or as a particularly
(08:21):
religious person, I'm nevertheless deeply moved and influenced by a
lot of Christian teachings. And one of the Biblical lines
that I think about a lot is um the idea
of the least of these Jesus says paraphrasing, but basically
like that which you do onto the least of these
you do unto me, And the idea that in every situation,
(08:43):
as a society, in a family, in a community, your
job is to find the people that are the most
vulnerable and to make sure that they're protected. And when
you do that, as a general rule of thumb, everything
else will be good. Everything else will follow. That's really
important to me, you know, after the election in twenty sixteen.
My kids were thirteen and eleven, and they said, they
(09:09):
said to me, what happened? What happened, like, explained to
me what that was? What is happening? And the only
explanation that I could come up with was like, well, look,
there are some people who believe that it is it
is your responsibility to care for others and that that
is and that is a primary thing, and that you
must do that. And then there are some people who
think that that is, that it's your responsibility to care
(09:31):
for your own and everyone else just needs to figure
out for themselves. And that is ultimately what appears to
have happened last night is that some people who believe
that second thing appeared to have gained more power. You know,
I was like your mother and I we know what
we believe. We believe that we must care for others,
like that is what we fundamentally believe. We're never not
(09:51):
going to believe that that is just who we are,
and you're going to have to figure out who you
are in the world. You know. I've done a fair
amount of teaching in in prisons, and the prison that
I teach in is a maximum security prison where people
are there for very long term or life sentences. And
(10:11):
one of the rules that we have is that we
don't we don't ask people like what they did or
why they're there. I know just from history that like
if not of the people that I'm dealing with in
that space are there because of the drug war, are
there because of poverty, are there because of unresolved trauma
in their own lives. And the idea that like one
(10:33):
out of those one hundred might just actually be a
psychopath doesn't make it worth it for me to focus
on that to me remote possibility, when I could be
focusing on like the human conversation that we're going to have.
And so to me, that's that's the idea of of
grace is just like assuming, even if you can't quite
(10:56):
work your way up to loving people, which is like
the Jesus standard, it's okay for us to not all
be Jesus at least understanding that people are human beings
and not not monsters. You've heard me ask a lot
of people how I like you. Just the way you
are applies to those who hurt us, who hurt others,
(11:17):
who are hurting whole groups of people and tearing apart
families and communities and institutions that do good in the world.
Would Fred Rogers like them just the way they are?
Eaves says, that's the wrong question. We spent a lot
of time asking the question like what about the bad people,
(11:38):
like are we adequately punishing the bad people, which usually
is a distraction from making sure that the person who's
actually been hurt is okay. And we've set up a
society where we tend to be really obsessed with punishing
people rather than actually caring for the people that have
been harmed. And that is a disregard that shows a
(11:58):
disregard for the idea of care for the least of these.
And if you believe that most of those bad things
themselves come from un dealt with harm, than the best
thing that we can do is deal with the harm.
In Mark seven, Jesus says the poor you will always
(12:19):
have with you, and you can help them whenever you want,
but you will not always have me. The idea is
that one day Jesus would leave his followers. Like all things,
he was saying, his presence is impermanent. The only permanent
thing is that people will still need help, and we
(12:40):
must continue to help those who need it. Notice he
doesn't say I'm gonna be gone, so I'm gonna need
you to keep on crushing all the bad guys and
making sure they learn their lessons. Like Eves said, his
focus is not unfixing the bad ones, but on helping
the needy ones. But that's hard. Sometimes. Sometimes I feel
(13:04):
like I have to keep an eye on what I'm
afraid of or what can hurt me. I have to
make sure it's locked away or properly defended against. The
things I'm afraid of are so loud and bright and
distracting that it's hard to turn my attention away from them,
even for a moment, hard to give up on the
idea that my job is to make sure the bad
(13:26):
people suffer. It's hard to do the quieter and slower
and maybe more vulnerable work of tending to the people
who have been wounded. I often feel too scared and
angry and hurt to do that. I feel like I
have too many people to protect. And maybe that's why
(13:50):
Fred Rogers was so focused on finding a way to
talk about our feelings, Because maybe I can't really help
people until I spend a lot of time sitting with
my own hurt more in a minute. One of the
(14:30):
things that Fred Todd is that in a child, every
behavior is a way the child communicates an underlying need.
If we were to apply that not just to children,
but to grown ups, we may find a behavior objectionable,
or we may find something that someone says objectionable. We
(14:52):
may find another person's opinion objectionable. But if we look
deeper and see what is the human need behind that,
it doesn't mean we have to agree with their opinions
and actions and words, but it does mean that we
should and can have empathy and have a connection with
(15:14):
the underlying human need. This is John Leah Lee. He
is a senior lecturer in Early childhood Education at Harvard.
He spent much of his professional career studying Fred's work.
He was co director of the Fred Rogers Center at
Saint Vincent's College, and one of the courses he teaches
at Harvard is about simple Interactions, a way of working
(15:35):
with kids that's based in part on the work of
Fred Rogers. Jen Lay also knows something about the dark
side of human behavior. He was born in Shanghai at
the tail end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the
late sixties and early seventies, the Chinese states sent millions
of people who they decided were bad neighbors in their
eyes into forced labor and exile, and murdered countless more.
(16:00):
Unlay's parents were sent to do manual work and rule China.
He was often separated from one or both of them.
This was not a culture of I like you just
the way you are. Gen Lay moved to America at
sixteen and discovered Mr. Rogers neighborhood in college where he
was studying child development. Fred's message of love and acceptance
(16:22):
came as a revelation and became gen Lay's model for
how to communicate with both children and adults. He told
me that Fred became a personal role model too, and
before we get into it, you should probably take a
deep breath and relax, because generally has a very thoughtful
Fred rogers like demeanor. I initially came to make available
(16:45):
educational opportunities for all children, but over time I think
it becomes more and more about how we can find
people all around the world who were doing that, or
the kind of people that Fred would call heroes, um
(17:06):
their ordinary heroes. I came into the field very much
want to be a helper, and twenty years later I
realized that perhaps the best thing I could do is
to find these helpers that are already out there and
do my best to support them. He exactly helping the helpers.
(17:30):
I think the most important lesson that I took from
Fred was this idea that if you looked carefully around you,
no matter where you are, if you looked carefully, you
will find that there are people that are helping one another.
(17:54):
The kindness and trust and respect that are example THI
by Fred's work is visible in real human communities. Not
everyone talks just like Mr Rogers or anything, but the
way they listen to children, the way they are able
(18:17):
to pay attention to not just what the child acts
out on the surface, but what do these behaviors tell
us about the inner needs of the child or the
young person. You know. I want to ask you a
little bit about today's context, um, because I when I
(18:43):
look around, I see a lot of fear and anger
and frustration, and and a feeling that things are rapidly
getting worse in a in a myriad of ways, and
people feeling helpless and hopeless. I want under if you
can imagine what kind of show he would make today.
(19:05):
Do you think he would continue along the same path
or would he find that he would have to do
something different. That's such a good question, and I can't
begin to imagine that I know what he would do.
But I think the underlying topic that Fred was so
(19:31):
interested in perhaps centers around this idea of empathy. Fred's
show is about confronting struggles and conflicts rather than evading them.
People of different ideas, different values, trying to work out
(19:51):
their differences and still operate on an assumption of trust
and respect for one another. And I think fred work
very strongly conveyed that a community is a place where
not everyone has to look the same, not everyone even
have to have the same interests or choose to live
(20:13):
the same way. Um like community is simply a place
where very diverse people get to live together, to listen
to one another and work through the differences that they have.
(20:34):
I think in a fearful world, we have a tendency
to accentuate every aspect that is different between person one
and person two. And as much as Fred wanted to
(20:55):
convey the message that all of us are different and
unique and special, Fred's underlying message, though, is we are
much more the same than we're different, and that paradoxically,
by pointing out the uniqueness of each individual, we actually
(21:17):
come to understand our common humanity. And that to me
is perhaps the spiritual root of empathy. To be able
to see the full humanity of the person that we
might fear. Mm hm, you know that is such a
(21:43):
weighty and heavy concept in this time. Um. We live
in a world in which there are systemic abuses of people,
and people feel the need to defend themselves, not just
against individuals, against systems, and and I think a lot
(22:04):
of times in those cases, people feel like there's there's
a there's a threat to their survival that comes with
that empathy that in order to protect themselves and their
families and who they love, they can't allow themselves that empathy.
You know, if you are a targeted group in a genocide,
(22:29):
is their use for you in finding empathy for the
person on the other side of the friends. Fred often
talked about the lesson the most important lesson that he
took from he's theology professor in Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, which
(22:51):
he went to ask this professor one time what this
particularly him means because they him said something about, you know,
the one thing, the one small thing that made evil fall.
And so he went to ask the professor, you know
what is this one small thing? And the answer was,
the one thing that evil cannot stand is forgiveness. And
(23:19):
I think as I read about the error in which
my parents and grandparents lived through, I think of a story.
There was an older gentleman that was very close to
my family. He was from West Virginia and became a minister,
(23:40):
and he and his wife and son were missionaries in China.
And after the World War two broke out, they were
taken by the Japanese and put inside a fairly bruto
concentration camp. And one of the command ds of the
(24:01):
camp we're humane to the American prisoners, and the minister,
his name is Joe. Years later, he sat down in
a Japanese house across the table from the commander of
the concentration camp, and the two of them shared the tea,
(24:24):
a cup of tea, and and I just think of
these things. They're almost illogical, but they are a reflection
of the fundamental trust that human beings, as much as
they're capable of evil and hatred, and and as much
(24:46):
as all of us have our fears and defensiveness that
in the end, I think when Fred tells us that
we are special, he meant that there's something deep down
inside each of us, not just some of us, but
each of us, without which humanity cannot survive. In his
(25:07):
public service announcements following September, he invoked, I think the
Jewish saying that essentially means we are called to be
repairers of creation, and we can understand that in more
(25:27):
broadly outside the religious context, is somehow that each of
us are called to be repairers of creation? And what
does repairing mean? Each of us is called to be
(25:52):
a repairer of creation? But how do we do that?
I think for everyone, though the question is the same,
the answer can be different. Not all of us can
sit down to tea with someone who represents the violent
forces of the state. The man from West Virginia that
John Lay talked about could, but many of us cannot
(26:16):
and maybe should not. And there's good reason for that.
If someone breaks into your home and harms your family
or loved ones in some violent way, and then I
decide to sit down with them the next day for
a pleasant tea under the guise of forgiveness and radical empathy.
That may be a dramatic, heroic act for me, but
(26:36):
it might be incredibly disrespectful and harmful to you. We're
told all the time that the ultimate act of love
is to forgive the people who have hurt you, and
that anything less is a shortcoming, maybe an understandable one,
but a shortcoming nonetheless something to get over. But who
(26:57):
benefits most from the quick and incessant march towards forgiveness?
Isn't it often those who commit the heinous act to
begin with? Don't they want, deeply want for their victims
to hug them and declare that it's all good. Wouldn't you?
(27:18):
Have you ever harmed someone? Have you ever participated in
or benefited from someone's harm? Wouldn't you want them to
forgive you? The idea of forgiving one's enemies loving one's
enemies is a beautiful one, and maybe even an ideal one,
But it's also a complicated one. Sometimes an act of
(27:41):
love and caring toward an oppressor is an act of
harm toward the oppressed, or toward ourselves. TV writer Megan Amram,
a brilliant person in her own right, put this idea
very succinctly on Twitter quote you can't be nice to
everyone because being nice to certain people is inherently cruel
to others. The viewing is right that after a point,
(28:05):
it's not helpful to focus on what to do about
the bad people. That's why I'm grateful that there are
other ways to be repairers of creation. Eve teaches in
an incarceration facility. I'm using my own holiday party in
my tiny little apartment to raise money for victims of
domestic violence, people who aren't able to celebrate with friends
(28:26):
and family as maybe we are. There are acts of
kindness towards children. The woman who raised me used to
go to the library to read stories to foster kids.
She also took in stray animals, and even once she
took in a stray kid named Carvel. But more than that,
(28:47):
there is the love and kindness and acceptance that we
show towards those who are struggling and hurting in our families,
in our communities. There's the willingness to listen, to hear,
and perhaps most importantly, to grow and change in response
to the pain of others. There is looking, really looking
(29:09):
for what is special? What is childlike? Maybe even what
is God like and each and every person that we encounter.
That is what Fred was showing us with the Neighborhood.
He was showing us what it feels like to be
treated as special and important and necessary. He was showing
(29:31):
each of us has something inside of us that humanity needs,
and for that reason alone, we are valuable. And our
task is not only to help see and grow that
valuable thing in each other, it is to see and
grow it within ourselves. And even though the world isn't
what it was when Fred created his TV neighborhood in
(29:53):
even if our lives seem more complicated and difficult, there
are people all around us who are actively helping to
make things better. There are people alive right now who
were showing us how to make it better too. A
couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in
stories of people who have shown you how to be
a helper. Here's one message we received from a listener
(30:16):
named Juan Helloa Um here in Hawaii, actually on my
way to my school where I'm a teacher. I've been
listening to your podcast and it's just inspired me. And
every time I listened to it, I think about one
person who When I was growing up back in New
York in a small suburb, white neighborhood, I was kind
(30:36):
of an outcast because my family was a Hispanic family
and we never had too many friends besides our family.
But there was a lady down the block named Me
and her and her son Jesse, they would always always
just be there for us. My father was working two jobs,
my mother never drove, so Genies is the first that
really took me out of the community and to be
(30:57):
on the neighborhood. She was the first person to teach
me to the old should which now living in Hawaii
means so much to me. She took me to museums,
she let me write books at her house, and these
kind of moments of joy are things that I really
steak with me still, and even though like I'm not
the best teacher by any means, I think that that's
something that's fundamentally what I try and do daily. So
(31:20):
I just want to give a big shout out Denise
and so the whole family, Jesse, Charlie, Brianna, they were
all there for me. But I definitely remember to me
just pining as a as a rock in my life
and just show me what it's like to be a
good neighbor, literally a good neighbor right down the block.
I hope you have a good one, and the more
(31:43):
of that next week and our final episode of Finding Friend.
Finding Fred is produced by Transmitter Media. Our team is
Daniel Donald, Jordan Bailey, and Maddie Foley. Our editor is
Sarah Nicks. The executive producer for Transmitter Media is Greta Cohne.
(32:07):
Executive producers at Fatherly are Simon Isaacs and Andrew Berman.
Thanks to the team and I Heart Media. Our show
is mixed by Rick Kwan, music by Blue Dot Sessions
and Alison Layton Brown. If you like what you're hearing,
rate the show, review the show, and tell a friend
I'm Carvel Wallace. Thank you for listening.
M hm m m. Mr Rogers tried to get us
to be our best self. That's a phrase that you know,
we hear variations of it a lot now, right like
live your best life, be your best self. What we
usually mean by that now is seek pathways to your
(00:22):
own joy and the kind of self celebration you want
to experience, which I think is great and I'm a
firm believer in that self love is really radical and important.
But when we say that Mr Rogers wanted people to
be their best self, there's something about like just encouraging
(00:42):
people to be good, right, to be good and to
be kind to themselves and to other people that I
actually think is a really rare message. I don't know
who is telling children or anyone be kind, you know,
and in a way that is lived out in their example,
(01:04):
and not like moralizing or pedantic or condescending. Fred Rogers
is everywhere right now, on t shirts and calendars and
coffee mugs. There's a movie and multiple books, articles and
major magazines and of course this podcast. And it seems
to me the reason we're seeing him everywhere is that
(01:27):
we believe, collectively there's something in what he taught us
that we need right now. But are we understanding the
right thing about him and his work? Or are we
just in love with the niceness, the nostalgia, the feel good.
Not that those are bad things in and of themselves,
(01:48):
but are they enough? Is it enough to fall in
love with this idea that each of us is likable?
Is that even the right idea? Because I don't think
that's all there was to his message. I'm Carvil Wallace
and this is Finding Fred, a podcast about Fred Rogers
(02:10):
from High Heart Media and Fatherly in partnership with Transmitter Media.
Fred Rogers grew up during the Depression, through World War
Two and the Holocaust. He had seen how horrible people
could be to one another, and his show spoke to that.
(02:32):
It launched just months before Bobby Kennedy's assassination, and Fred
made a p s A in response to it, and
just a few weeks after he officially retired, he made
another p s A right after September. We've talked about
how Fred didn't want to do the announcement at all
in the face of such enormous violence and tragedy. He
(02:52):
said he couldn't see how it would do any good,
but he did it anyway. The writer and educated or
e viewing who you remember from episode two was watching
There's this video that I've watched a lot where he
addresses us as adults. You know. He's saying, sometimes I
see you all on the streets. I run into you,
(03:14):
those of you who grew up in the neighborhood, you know,
And when I see you, I tell you, just like
I did when you were very small, that I'm just
so proud of you, you know, and I like you
just the way you are. A lot of people who
heard Fred's p s A took comfort in his message
look for the helpers, but Eve heard something else. He
(03:38):
is talking to you as an individual, but now as
an adult, and that's his opportunity to say something else
or to like break this character. And the thing he
chooses to say is I still see you. I'm still
proud of you and see the child in you. And
I think that when we talk about forgiving people and
not believing in monsters, to me, that's what much of
(03:59):
that amount to is knowing that everybody was somebody's child.
You know, who has been hurt, or who's been afraid,
or who's been trying their best to learn, or who's
been trying to be resilient in a difficult situation. We've
talked about what it means to do what Fred did,
listen carefully and speak to the children inside people. But
what are we supposed to do when the child is
(04:21):
afraid and acting out, throwing tantrums and destroying things. What
are we supposed to do when the child inside other
people makes them dangerous and destructive? And when that's making
us feel afraid like we want to lash out and
hurt people who are hurting us. What are we supposed
to do then? And who can show us how to
(04:42):
act in a world like this one here today? My
mom told me all the time and continues to tell
me that you know, your responsibility is to be a lightbringer,
and your job is to be a door opener, not
a gatekeeper. And all of us have that grandma, that neighbor,
(05:04):
that uncle, that guy on the corner store. You know,
I remember like riding the train with my mom and
we didn't have a car, and going down to the
train station and there was this South Asian man who
ran the convenience store in the train station, and you know,
whenever we went to get on the train, he would
give me like a small caramel square, you know, those
like little cubes, just like a no brand, no name,
(05:27):
like caramel cube. And those are the small moments as
a kid that I just remember feeling like, oh, I'm somebody.
Somebody told me that I was special today. And I
think that message can come from a lot of messengers.
And definitely race and class and culture and religion and
geography and all those things can make it harder here,
but it usually comes through loud and clear if the
(05:48):
person really cares about you. There are helpers everywhere, people
who really see us and are kind to us, and
there are also people who show us how to be helpers,
who model it for us. My paternal grandfather, incidentally, is
(06:10):
a white man who is a lay Presbyterian minister. He
grew up on a really small farm in the depression
in rural Illinois, and in so many ways reminds me
of Mr Rogers. He has a uniform like Mr Rogers.
He just wears like short sleeve button down shirts in
(06:31):
the same way that Mr Rodgers always wears his card agaan.
But my grandfather has children and grandchildren that have lived
just radically different lives than him, you know, in terms
of like race, class, culture, interests. Paul just like everything
that you can think of, and he just is such
(06:53):
a deeply, deeply kind and caring person. My uncle married
a really some woman who didn't grow up in the
church or anything like that, and I remember she said
when she met my grandfather, she was like, Oh, this
is the first real Christian I've ever met, Like, this
is the first person that actually they say they're a
Christian and it means that they like do all this
(07:13):
stuff that Jesus said to do right. And he's always
just made me feel completely unconditionally loved and accepted. But
I also see him treat other people that way in
a way that makes it clear that it's not just
about me being his grandchild, but what he believes about
the world. And going to visit my grandparents and just
meeting random people that were staying in their house temporarily
(07:37):
because that's what they needed in the moment also made
a big impression on me as a kid that I
could come and meet somebody and just be told like, oh,
you know, they needed to stay here for for this
period of time because of X y Z. And I
think that that idea of an open home quite literal
in in both the case of my grandfather and the
case of Mr Rogers, right like, I think that's something
(07:59):
also that's incidental that we're in Mr Rogers's house. He's
welcoming us into his house. Eve's grandfather showed her one
way to be open and generous in a world that
seems hell bent on the opposite. I don't I don't
identify as a Christian um, but I think that even
though I don't identify that way or as a particularly
(08:21):
religious person, I'm nevertheless deeply moved and influenced by a
lot of Christian teachings. And one of the Biblical lines
that I think about a lot is um the idea
of the least of these Jesus says paraphrasing, but basically
like that which you do onto the least of these
you do unto me, And the idea that in every situation,
(08:43):
as a society, in a family, in a community, your
job is to find the people that are the most
vulnerable and to make sure that they're protected. And when
you do that, as a general rule of thumb, everything
else will be good. Everything else will follow. That's really
important to me, you know, after the election in twenty sixteen.
My kids were thirteen and eleven, and they said, they
(09:09):
said to me, what happened? What happened, like, explained to
me what that was? What is happening? And the only
explanation that I could come up with was like, well, look,
there are some people who believe that it is it
is your responsibility to care for others and that that
is and that is a primary thing, and that you
must do that. And then there are some people who
think that that is, that it's your responsibility to care
(09:31):
for your own and everyone else just needs to figure
out for themselves. And that is ultimately what appears to
have happened last night is that some people who believe
that second thing appeared to have gained more power. You know,
I was like your mother and I we know what
we believe. We believe that we must care for others,
like that is what we fundamentally believe. We're never not
(09:51):
going to believe that that is just who we are,
and you're going to have to figure out who you
are in the world. You know. I've done a fair
amount of teaching in in prisons, and the prison that
I teach in is a maximum security prison where people
are there for very long term or life sentences. And
(10:11):
one of the rules that we have is that we
don't we don't ask people like what they did or
why they're there. I know just from history that like
if not of the people that I'm dealing with in
that space are there because of the drug war, are
there because of poverty, are there because of unresolved trauma
in their own lives. And the idea that like one
(10:33):
out of those one hundred might just actually be a
psychopath doesn't make it worth it for me to focus
on that to me remote possibility, when I could be
focusing on like the human conversation that we're going to have.
And so to me, that's that's the idea of of
grace is just like assuming, even if you can't quite
(10:56):
work your way up to loving people, which is like
the Jesus standard, it's okay for us to not all
be Jesus at least understanding that people are human beings
and not not monsters. You've heard me ask a lot
of people how I like you. Just the way you
are applies to those who hurt us, who hurt others,
(11:17):
who are hurting whole groups of people and tearing apart
families and communities and institutions that do good in the world.
Would Fred Rogers like them just the way they are?
Eaves says, that's the wrong question. We spent a lot
of time asking the question like what about the bad people,
(11:38):
like are we adequately punishing the bad people, which usually
is a distraction from making sure that the person who's
actually been hurt is okay. And we've set up a
society where we tend to be really obsessed with punishing
people rather than actually caring for the people that have
been harmed. And that is a disregard that shows a
(11:58):
disregard for the idea of care for the least of these.
And if you believe that most of those bad things
themselves come from un dealt with harm, than the best
thing that we can do is deal with the harm.
In Mark seven, Jesus says the poor you will always
(12:19):
have with you, and you can help them whenever you want,
but you will not always have me. The idea is
that one day Jesus would leave his followers. Like all things,
he was saying, his presence is impermanent. The only permanent
thing is that people will still need help, and we
(12:40):
must continue to help those who need it. Notice he
doesn't say I'm gonna be gone, so I'm gonna need
you to keep on crushing all the bad guys and
making sure they learn their lessons. Like Eves said, his
focus is not unfixing the bad ones, but on helping
the needy ones. But that's hard. Sometimes. Sometimes I feel
(13:04):
like I have to keep an eye on what I'm
afraid of or what can hurt me. I have to
make sure it's locked away or properly defended against. The
things I'm afraid of are so loud and bright and
distracting that it's hard to turn my attention away from them,
even for a moment, hard to give up on the
idea that my job is to make sure the bad
(13:26):
people suffer. It's hard to do the quieter and slower
and maybe more vulnerable work of tending to the people
who have been wounded. I often feel too scared and
angry and hurt to do that. I feel like I
have too many people to protect. And maybe that's why
(13:50):
Fred Rogers was so focused on finding a way to
talk about our feelings, Because maybe I can't really help
people until I spend a lot of time sitting with
my own hurt more in a minute. One of the
(14:30):
things that Fred Todd is that in a child, every
behavior is a way the child communicates an underlying need.
If we were to apply that not just to children,
but to grown ups, we may find a behavior objectionable,
or we may find something that someone says objectionable. We
(14:52):
may find another person's opinion objectionable. But if we look
deeper and see what is the human need behind that,
it doesn't mean we have to agree with their opinions
and actions and words, but it does mean that we
should and can have empathy and have a connection with
(15:14):
the underlying human need. This is John Leah Lee. He
is a senior lecturer in Early childhood Education at Harvard.
He spent much of his professional career studying Fred's work.
He was co director of the Fred Rogers Center at
Saint Vincent's College, and one of the courses he teaches
at Harvard is about simple Interactions, a way of working
(15:35):
with kids that's based in part on the work of
Fred Rogers. Jen Lay also knows something about the dark
side of human behavior. He was born in Shanghai at
the tail end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the
late sixties and early seventies, the Chinese states sent millions
of people who they decided were bad neighbors in their
eyes into forced labor and exile, and murdered countless more.
(16:00):
Unlay's parents were sent to do manual work and rule China.
He was often separated from one or both of them.
This was not a culture of I like you just
the way you are. Gen Lay moved to America at
sixteen and discovered Mr. Rogers neighborhood in college where he
was studying child development. Fred's message of love and acceptance
(16:22):
came as a revelation and became gen Lay's model for
how to communicate with both children and adults. He told
me that Fred became a personal role model too, and
before we get into it, you should probably take a
deep breath and relax, because generally has a very thoughtful
Fred rogers like demeanor. I initially came to make available
(16:45):
educational opportunities for all children, but over time I think
it becomes more and more about how we can find
people all around the world who were doing that, or
the kind of people that Fred would call heroes, um
(17:06):
their ordinary heroes. I came into the field very much
want to be a helper, and twenty years later I
realized that perhaps the best thing I could do is
to find these helpers that are already out there and
do my best to support them. He exactly helping the helpers.
(17:30):
I think the most important lesson that I took from
Fred was this idea that if you looked carefully around you,
no matter where you are, if you looked carefully, you
will find that there are people that are helping one another.
(17:54):
The kindness and trust and respect that are example THI
by Fred's work is visible in real human communities. Not
everyone talks just like Mr Rogers or anything, but the
way they listen to children, the way they are able
(18:17):
to pay attention to not just what the child acts
out on the surface, but what do these behaviors tell
us about the inner needs of the child or the
young person. You know. I want to ask you a
little bit about today's context, um, because I when I
(18:43):
look around, I see a lot of fear and anger
and frustration, and and a feeling that things are rapidly
getting worse in a in a myriad of ways, and
people feeling helpless and hopeless. I want under if you
can imagine what kind of show he would make today.
(19:05):
Do you think he would continue along the same path
or would he find that he would have to do
something different. That's such a good question, and I can't
begin to imagine that I know what he would do.
But I think the underlying topic that Fred was so
(19:31):
interested in perhaps centers around this idea of empathy. Fred's
show is about confronting struggles and conflicts rather than evading them.
People of different ideas, different values, trying to work out
(19:51):
their differences and still operate on an assumption of trust
and respect for one another. And I think fred work
very strongly conveyed that a community is a place where
not everyone has to look the same, not everyone even
have to have the same interests or choose to live
(20:13):
the same way. Um like community is simply a place
where very diverse people get to live together, to listen
to one another and work through the differences that they have.
(20:34):
I think in a fearful world, we have a tendency
to accentuate every aspect that is different between person one
and person two. And as much as Fred wanted to
(20:55):
convey the message that all of us are different and
unique and special, Fred's underlying message, though, is we are
much more the same than we're different, and that paradoxically,
by pointing out the uniqueness of each individual, we actually
(21:17):
come to understand our common humanity. And that to me
is perhaps the spiritual root of empathy. To be able
to see the full humanity of the person that we
might fear. Mm hm, you know that is such a
(21:43):
weighty and heavy concept in this time. Um. We live
in a world in which there are systemic abuses of people,
and people feel the need to defend themselves, not just
against individuals, against systems, and and I think a lot
(22:04):
of times in those cases, people feel like there's there's
a there's a threat to their survival that comes with
that empathy that in order to protect themselves and their
families and who they love, they can't allow themselves that empathy.
You know, if you are a targeted group in a genocide,
(22:29):
is their use for you in finding empathy for the
person on the other side of the friends. Fred often
talked about the lesson the most important lesson that he
took from he's theology professor in Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, which
(22:51):
he went to ask this professor one time what this
particularly him means because they him said something about, you know,
the one thing, the one small thing that made evil fall.
And so he went to ask the professor, you know
what is this one small thing? And the answer was,
the one thing that evil cannot stand is forgiveness. And
(23:19):
I think as I read about the error in which
my parents and grandparents lived through, I think of a story.
There was an older gentleman that was very close to
my family. He was from West Virginia and became a minister,
(23:40):
and he and his wife and son were missionaries in China.
And after the World War two broke out, they were
taken by the Japanese and put inside a fairly bruto
concentration camp. And one of the command ds of the
(24:01):
camp we're humane to the American prisoners, and the minister,
his name is Joe. Years later, he sat down in
a Japanese house across the table from the commander of
the concentration camp, and the two of them shared the tea,
(24:24):
a cup of tea, and and I just think of
these things. They're almost illogical, but they are a reflection
of the fundamental trust that human beings, as much as
they're capable of evil and hatred, and and as much
(24:46):
as all of us have our fears and defensiveness that
in the end, I think when Fred tells us that
we are special, he meant that there's something deep down
inside each of us, not just some of us, but
each of us, without which humanity cannot survive. In his
(25:07):
public service announcements following September, he invoked, I think the
Jewish saying that essentially means we are called to be
repairers of creation, and we can understand that in more
(25:27):
broadly outside the religious context, is somehow that each of
us are called to be repairers of creation? And what
does repairing mean? Each of us is called to be
(25:52):
a repairer of creation? But how do we do that?
I think for everyone, though the question is the same,
the answer can be different. Not all of us can
sit down to tea with someone who represents the violent
forces of the state. The man from West Virginia that
John Lay talked about could, but many of us cannot
(26:16):
and maybe should not. And there's good reason for that.
If someone breaks into your home and harms your family
or loved ones in some violent way, and then I
decide to sit down with them the next day for
a pleasant tea under the guise of forgiveness and radical empathy.
That may be a dramatic, heroic act for me, but
(26:36):
it might be incredibly disrespectful and harmful to you. We're
told all the time that the ultimate act of love
is to forgive the people who have hurt you, and
that anything less is a shortcoming, maybe an understandable one,
but a shortcoming nonetheless something to get over. But who
(26:57):
benefits most from the quick and incessant march towards forgiveness?
Isn't it often those who commit the heinous act to
begin with? Don't they want, deeply want for their victims
to hug them and declare that it's all good. Wouldn't you?
(27:18):
Have you ever harmed someone? Have you ever participated in
or benefited from someone's harm? Wouldn't you want them to
forgive you? The idea of forgiving one's enemies loving one's
enemies is a beautiful one, and maybe even an ideal one,
But it's also a complicated one. Sometimes an act of
(27:41):
love and caring toward an oppressor is an act of
harm toward the oppressed, or toward ourselves. TV writer Megan Amram,
a brilliant person in her own right, put this idea
very succinctly on Twitter quote you can't be nice to
everyone because being nice to certain people is inherently cruel
to others. The viewing is right that after a point,
(28:05):
it's not helpful to focus on what to do about
the bad people. That's why I'm grateful that there are
other ways to be repairers of creation. Eve teaches in
an incarceration facility. I'm using my own holiday party in
my tiny little apartment to raise money for victims of
domestic violence, people who aren't able to celebrate with friends
(28:26):
and family as maybe we are. There are acts of
kindness towards children. The woman who raised me used to
go to the library to read stories to foster kids.
She also took in stray animals, and even once she
took in a stray kid named Carvel. But more than that,
(28:47):
there is the love and kindness and acceptance that we
show towards those who are struggling and hurting in our families,
in our communities. There's the willingness to listen, to hear,
and perhaps most importantly, to grow and change in response
to the pain of others. There is looking, really looking
(29:09):
for what is special? What is childlike? Maybe even what
is God like and each and every person that we encounter.
That is what Fred was showing us with the Neighborhood.
He was showing us what it feels like to be
treated as special and important and necessary. He was showing
(29:31):
each of us has something inside of us that humanity needs,
and for that reason alone, we are valuable. And our
task is not only to help see and grow that
valuable thing in each other, it is to see and
grow it within ourselves. And even though the world isn't
what it was when Fred created his TV neighborhood in
(29:53):
even if our lives seem more complicated and difficult, there
are people all around us who are actively helping to
make things better. There are people alive right now who
were showing us how to make it better too. A
couple of weeks ago, we asked you to send in
stories of people who have shown you how to be
a helper. Here's one message we received from a listener
(30:16):
named Juan Helloa Um here in Hawaii, actually on my
way to my school where I'm a teacher. I've been
listening to your podcast and it's just inspired me. And
every time I listened to it, I think about one
person who When I was growing up back in New
York in a small suburb, white neighborhood, I was kind
(30:36):
of an outcast because my family was a Hispanic family
and we never had too many friends besides our family.
But there was a lady down the block named Me
and her and her son Jesse, they would always always
just be there for us. My father was working two jobs,
my mother never drove, so Genies is the first that
really took me out of the community and to be
(30:57):
on the neighborhood. She was the first person to teach
me to the old should which now living in Hawaii
means so much to me. She took me to museums,
she let me write books at her house, and these
kind of moments of joy are things that I really
steak with me still, and even though like I'm not
the best teacher by any means, I think that that's
something that's fundamentally what I try and do daily. So
(31:20):
I just want to give a big shout out Denise
and so the whole family, Jesse, Charlie, Brianna, they were
all there for me. But I definitely remember to me
just pining as a as a rock in my life
and just show me what it's like to be a
good neighbor, literally a good neighbor right down the block.
I hope you have a good one, and the more
(31:43):
of that next week and our final episode of Finding Friend.
Finding Fred is produced by Transmitter Media. Our team is
Daniel Donald, Jordan Bailey, and Maddie Foley. Our editor is
Sarah Nicks. The executive producer for Transmitter Media is Greta Cohne.
(32:07):
Executive producers at Fatherly are Simon Isaacs and Andrew Berman.
Thanks to the team and I Heart Media. Our show
is mixed by Rick Kwan, music by Blue Dot Sessions
and Alison Layton Brown. If you like what you're hearing,
rate the show, review the show, and tell a friend
I'm Carvel Wallace. Thank you for listening.
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