Like everyone (I assume) in the US, we’ve been inundated with political ads.
We don’t watch TV, so that helps. But the volume of postcards has been ridiculous.
In particular, we received a postcard most days for several weeks, telling us the evils of one specific (not presidential) candidate.
If I didn’t know the state-level politics, I wouldn’t even know from all this mail who he was running against.
We pulled another one of these pieces of trash out of our mailbox, and The Kid shared what he’s learned about these ads:
“It’s not good to say all bad things about your opponent. It means you have nothing good to say about yourself.”
Good call, little dude.
We expanded that conversation to include other kids being mean and having nothing good to say about you (or others).
“Because they have nothing good to say about themselves?”
Yep. Which doesn’t mean they have nothing good about them, just they don’t see it in themselves.
You know how sometimes, you feel like everything about you is wrong? Everyone feels like that sometimes. But some kids have parents who don’t tell them that those feelings aren’t true, and they start to believe them more and more. Or some kids have parents who tell them that those things are true, which of course is incorrect, but you can’t expect a little kid to know that, and they grow up to believe there’s nothing good about them.
He understood.
Those kids grow up and become adults who have nothing good to say about themselves and instead rely on saying bad things—true or untrue—about others. We don’t need political attack ads to see this daily. We do need to do two things to remedy it.
One: teach children that they’re worthy and lovable, even when they make mistakes, even when they make bad choices, even when you’re impatient—because it’s not about you.
Two: help people who haven’t learned that heal. Whether you think they deserve compassion or not (again, not about you). Because we’ll all be better if more people feel whole.