Always be kind

An unexpected wartime slogan

I see the world as a parent. Before my children were born, I was judgmental. After fifteen years with kids, I look at dads and moms and think “Wow, they are doing a good job.”

I just had a moment like that in Ukraine, talking about drone warfare. I was in Kyiv, on St. Michael’s Square, recording a video about the work we have done these last three years to raise funds for drone defense, a system that is protecting Ukrainians right now. Passersby knew what I was talking about; the worst drone attack on Kyiv had taken place just a few days before.

To my left I sensed a presence. It was a family: mom and dad, boy of about six. When the filming was done, the mom came over to say a friendly word. As I smiled goodbye to the three of them, I saw the message on her son’s t-shirt:

Always be kind.

War and parenting are close. Children are killed and parents live on. Parents are killed and children live on.

In this war, some Ukrainian children live on in Russia: kidnapped and handed over to Russian families to be russified. Their re-education is a darkness of this war. Children in Russia are militarized from elementary school.

Three years ago I was talking to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, about freedom; he spoke of that subject in terms of parenting, recalling his own parents, referring elliptically to his children. Trying to find a way to express the abnormality of Russian military parades for small children, he said: “kids just want to go to McDonald’s!” The experienced dad was talking. And taking your kids for fast food is OK parenting. Though perhaps not as good as the t-shirt:

Always be kind.

It is hard to be a kid. And it is hard to be a parent. And covid made everything harder. And when I read the t-shirt and caught the boy’s eye I thought: yes, his whole life, assuming he has been here in Kyiv, has been covid and air raids. The full-scale Russian invasion began in February 2022, so for Ukrainian kids there was no gap between germs and bombs. Millions of Ukrainian boy and girls still have some or all of their school days on line, because the Russians fire rockets and drones at schools. It takes time to adapt basements and build new schools underground.

In Ukraine, and in other war zones, and amidst other catastrophes and difficulties, parents raise children, or mourn them. And what is to admire, or what I admire at least, is parenting that teaches children how to be with others, how to do things, and also how to imagine a world that is different than this one, that is better. It is a challenge, not an escape, to teach:

Always be kind.

I filmed that message about drones after returning to Kyiv from visits to various points on the front. Facing an enemy that fights without restrictions, left in the lurch by allies, living with extremes, Ukrainian soldiers have much to say about the moral construction of the world, and it has an eloquence that goes beyond any one slogan. In Dnipro I was talking to an infantryman serving in Pokrovsk. His picture was taken. He said “Maybe I can smile when this is over.”

We will not always be kind. There are times when we cannot be kind. There are other good things besides kindness, and we have to make choices. And often we are weak, or flummoxed, or exhausted.

But that word “always,” on a boy’s chest in the middle of a city that has been pounded for three years, has to be there, as a reminder that ideals are ideals, and that they are part of reality. “Sometimes be kind” doesn’t quite do it.

It matters that Ukraine has not fought the war the way that Russia has. The Russian approach has been criminal from the beginning: the invasion itself was illegal, and the kidnappings and bombings of civilians are war crimes, as is the systematic terror and executions in occupied terrains. We are educated by this, sadly: too often we look at the ruins of a building in Ukraine or elsewhere and think that this is simply war.

But that is not the case. War can be fought in different ways. It matters that Russia tortures its prisoners of war and that Ukraine does not.

I have friends who have survived Russian captivity. I don’t want to speak for them. I only want to say that the words they choose for themselves, when they find them, have to do with what came before, with how they were taught, with ideas of right and wrong.

Always be kind.

Does kindness seem like a naive message during a war of extermination? Not to me. I admire friendly parents and kind children in the best of times, and I will admire them in the worst of times.

To defend you have to have something to defend. It will always be out of reach, but it matters whether or not you are reaching, or teaching others to reach.