Let’s turn our holiday spirit into a year-round campaign of defiant kindness

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This election has badly shaken my guiding assumption that Americans are a friendly, optimistic people working together to steadily improve a beautiful and imperfect country. I have struggled to regain a sense of agency and to imagine what we ordinary citizens could do to lighten up the dark, four-year tunnel it feels like we are entering.

Then the Christmas season arrived. And I remembered that Jesus Christ, whom I revere but do not worship, was a political threat from the day he was born until the day he died. The prince of peace, the man who blessed the meek and taught turning the other cheek, was such a menace to the neighborhood autocrats that first, King Herod desperately scrambled to try to find and murder the baby, and then Pontius Pilate and his cronies arrested and executed the itinerant preacher. Good will toward men is incompatible with autocracy.

The holiday season brings out the Christ in us. Early the other morning as I was walking across the parking lot at the YMCA, a total stranger smiled broadly at me and said, “Have a truly wonderful day.”

And 10 minutes later at a coffee shop, a woman, whom I know only from seeing her there a few times, came up and asked if she could give me a hug because: “The world needs more hugs.”

Holiday spirit is a political threat to any aspiring autocrat who depends on fear and dissension. It couldn’t come at a better time.

I like the legend of the two wolves: A grandfather is meditating, and his grandson asks him what he is thinking about. The old man explains that everyone has two wolves inside. The good wolf is kindness, gratitude, courage and humility. The bad wolf is selfishness, anger, deceit and meanness. And the two wolves are always fighting. The boy asks, “Which one wins?” And his grandfather replies, “Whichever one you feed.”

We all have good wolves, so kindness is a nonpartisan strategy.

Our democracy is accustomed to vigorous disputes and strong rhetoric. But promises of retribution, insults and streams of lies feed our bad wolf. The spectacle of conduct like this given free rein threatens to liberate our carefully controlled impulses to lash out when we feel like it, pursue unbridled self-interest and tear down whatever we don’t like.

Alarms are already beginning to sound about the rousing of our darker nature. New York Review of Books essayist Fintan O’Toole warns that American society is experiencing “disinhibition”: a condition where people become increasingly unable to regulate the expression of their instincts and urges.

Elizabeth Bruenig of The Atlantic says our new leader’s style of behavior offers the psychic relief of allowing people to express malign energies.

But we are also in danger of just sinking slowly into cynicism. Joe Biden’s pardon of his son was a low point in a long, honorable career. But with Cabinet posts being handed out to scoundrels, what is the harm in giving a break to your son?

Holiday-style good will toward each other fortifies us against malign energies and creeping cynicism. Kindness nourishes the good wolf of each person who receives it. When a driver lets me merge to the right ahead of them to get to an exit, I look more fondly on all of humanity. And written expressions of gratitude reinforce my generous impulses.

I’ve been thinking about what good-wolf food we can offer each other beyond hugs and courteous driving. And here advanced age has a benefit — a bigger database of useful memories.

How about upgrading the way we talk to each other? The f-word used to be reserved for a hammer coming down on a thumb; now it is used for mild emphasis — a gift to no one.

My father spent four years in the wartime Navy, not exactly a haven for polite speech. But in the 18 years I lived with him the only curse I ever heard from him was one “B.S.” (he used the words, not the abbreviation) that I richly deserved. Maybe that is one reason he was respected in our church and throughout our town.

As we enter this dark tunnel, remembering to hold the door open for the next person seems like a small thing. But kindness is a step we can take every day toward a big thing: not only nourishing others but truly elevating ourselves. Back to the Bible for the best advice of all for elevating ourselves in a crude world: “Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things” (Philippians 4:8, New International Version).

Peace on earth, good will toward men. As-Salamu Alaykum. Shalom. That’s our power.