Kill Them With Kindness

Another post in a series on Famous Family Sayings

One of the ways Mom and Dad tried to help us get along was by the Golden Rule: “Treat others as you would like to be treated.” In a family of nine, that was definitely a great way to live because we really couldn’t be fighting all the time. Oh, the noise! So we did the best we could and tried to get along. However, kids will be kids. We did stupid things, we said stupid things and sometimes we even got in fights. If the Silver Rule was to “Turn the other cheek”, then the Bronze Rule, though somewhat lesser known, was “Kill them with kindness.” If someone was bothering you, or giving you a hard time, or heaven forbid wanted to fight, we were told to “Kill them with kindness.”

I can remember plenty of times when we were playing street hockey, football, wiffle ball, or any of the other assorted games we played in our neighborhood, there was an argument. In the heat of the battle, the following kinds of things were screamed at the top of someone’s lungs: It never went in, it hit the post! You were out of bounds when you caught it! I didn’t swing and miss, I just barely ticked it! I called time because a car was coming! We certainly weren’t following the Bronze Rule in our middle of the street clashes, but most of the time somebody gave in or gave up, and the game went on. However, there were times that someone had had too much of somebody cheating or whining and they almost came to blows. They wanted to kill each other with something but it wasn’t kindness.

It happened to me once. One guy who participated in our epic competitions was a year older than me and about six inches taller than me, and he always had to get his way. Now that I think of it, he was taller than everybody that played in those games. Anyway, if he was losing, you knew he was going to pull something out of nowhere to try and gain the advantage. If you took the ball away in street hockey, you slashed him. If you scored a touchdown, you were offside. One day toward the end of a football game I went out for a pass, he pushed me down from behind before the ball even got there, and then triumphantly yelled, “Incomplete!” Having had enough of his bogus penalties and cheating all day, I jumped up, pushed him back and screamed “Interference!” in his face (of course, my calling of penalties was always justified).

After a couple of more pushes back and forth and some more yelling, our fists were suddenly up in the air and we were ready to rumble. Instead of “Killing him with kindness” I had some other things on my mind that may have worked:

• A punch of encouragement to the gut. Though not as strong as “Killing him with kindness”, a well-placed punch to the midsection could be just what the doctor ordered – for the one doing the punching, not the one receiving.
• A heart felt body slam to the ground. Nothing says “You’re a good friend” better than that. Probably not the best option though, seeing as he was about six inches taller than me.
• A choke hold of good cheer. If I couldn’t “Kill him with kindness” maybe I could have just made him lose consciousness for a minute. That would have cheered me up.
• A karate chop of compassion to the solar plexus. I should have thought about how hard it must have been to have to cheat and lie in order to always win. Knocking the wind out of him may have helped me have a little more compassion. 

Well, none of that happened. Not one punch was thrown because the two of us waited for the other to throw the first punch, which never came. What did come was his older sister, who pushed us apart, gave us a talking to, and then dragged him home, yelling at him the whole way. After that day we were all way more afraid of her than him.

If I had followed the “Kill them with kindness” rule, I probably would have gotten in a lot less trouble, because there was often someone around that bothered me or gave me a hard time –  brothers and sisters included! On the flip side, with all those people I would have been killing with kindness, that would have also made me a mass murderer. 

Guilty

There are times you do something that you know is wrong, or you realize after the fact that it was wrong. If you’re like most people, you feel guilty. Some people feel hardly any guilt; others feel more than is warranted. Remember in the movie A Christmas Story when Flick gets his tongue stuck to the sign post in the middle of winter? After Flick comes back, the teacher, Miss Shields, tries to get the kids to own up to who made Flick do it. When Flick won’t rat out his friends and no one will come forward, she says, “I’m sure the guilt you feel is far worse than any punishment you might receive.” She follows that up with that pitiful face that’s supposed to make the kids feel bad and says, “Don’t you feel terrible? Don’t you feel remorse for what you have done? That’s all I’m going to say about poor Flick.”

The voice-over comes out with a classic line at this time, “Adults love to say things like that but kids know better. We knew darn well it was always better NOT to get caught.” Guilt? Not so much. You can’t make people feel guilty. They either do or they don’t. I tended to have a “guilty conscience” when I was a kid. When I did something wrong, and I knew it was wrong, I could just picture my Mom standing there with a sad face, shaking her head, making me feel terrible. However, I was usually able to shake that feeling off because like the kids in A Christmas Story, I knew it was better not to get caught. There was one time, though, that I did get caught.

Somehow, my friend Smitty had found out that you could get into our elementary school through the roof. Apparently there was a door on the roof that wasn’t locked. So one Saturday morning we went to the school, Smitty shimmied up a pole to the roof and about 30 seconds later opened the front door for me. We crossed the hallway to the office and the first thing we did was what a lot of kids always wanted to do – speak over the intercom. That’s right, we turned on the microphone and started doing bits from The Three Stooges. We each did the “Doctor Howard! Doctor Fine! Doctor Howard!” bit, Smitty did the “Ba ba ba boo, are you listening, ba ba ba boo!” bit, and we both did our finest imitations of the school principal reading the morning announcements. Then in the blink of an eye, everything changed.

Smitty was staring out the front door, wide-eyed, pointing. One word was all it took to bring all the fun and games to an end: “Cops!” We turned off the intercom, walked casually out the front door and hoped the police officer would think we were just walking along, minding our own business. That thought was dashed when the police car screeched to a halt directly next to us and the officer jumped out. He asked us what we were doing in the school and how we got in. We tried to say we hadn’t been in the school, but he wasn’t buying it. He told us to wait next to his car and went and checked the front door, while Smitty and I debated making a run for it.

He looked around a bit and came back to us and asked us again what we were doing in the school, studying our faces to see if we were telling the truth. When he told us that a silent alarm had been tripped when the front door was opened (I wish we had thought of that!) and we were the only people around, we were smart enough to confess and told him the whole story. He even laughed a little when we told him we were doing Three Stooges stuff over the intercom. I actually thought we were off Scot-free and was starting to relax a bit when he asked us our names and where we lived. This time I couldn’t get rid of the picture of my Mom standing there with a sad face, shaking her head. I felt terrible. I WAS GUILTY!

Smitty and I walked back to our neighborhood in near silence, contemplating the punishment that was sure to come, not just from our parents but from the school, too. I felt like a juvenile delinquent. I wondered what reform school would be like. We came out from behind my house and, horror of horrors, the same police cruiser was sitting in front of my house with the police officer talking to my brothers and some other kids who had been playing basketball. He called us over, told us he believed us that we were just goofing around on the intercom, and gave us a mini-lecture about breaking into schools and how much trouble we could have been in.

I couldn’t believe that we were actually off the hook, and yet I still didn’t feel good about it. I had done something wrong and I had got caught. Even though I didn’t get in trouble for that incident, Miss Shields in A Christmas Story was right. The guilt I felt truly was far worse than any punishment I might have received.