So Stephanie and I were on our way to mass at 6:15 this morning, something we’ve tried to do once a week since last Lent. As we were driving, I started telling her this story that I read in a haze not forty-five minutes earlier. I didn’t even know if I was explaining it properly when she said, “So the two people trying to be kind ended up the most punished?”
Well… yes, actually. Let’s pay a visit down the rabbit hole, shall we?
So a couple of weeks ago, a man named Carson King attended a taping of ESPN’s College GameDay. Now I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this show, but it serves two purposes: to highlight one of the biggest games of the week, and to serve as a way for college students to try sneak in handmade signage into the background of the live broadcast. Just Google some of the signs that have actually made it on the air, and you’ll realize why it’s become appointment viewing.
Like many before him, King made himself a rudimentary sign which probably took him all of a minute and change to put together, and held it up for the viewing audience to see. The sign itself was pretty innocuous:
So a couple of King’s friends laughed and said, “I can donate a few shekels to that cause.” So they did. But then, so did a few more. And then a lot more. Before he knew it, Carson King had amassed more than $100,000 in his Venmo account.
Now, we’ve read those stories in the past when a bank makes a clerical error and inadvertently deposits ten-grand into an account that the person didn’t have prior, nor had the right to have. And then some of those people actually go out and blow it all because, “Hey, it was your mistake, Mr. Banker.”
This guy had every right to every penny in that account. He could have bought enough Busch Light to throw a week-long kegger for literally every single person in Iowa.
But no, that’s not who Carson King is. Instead, he said, “I can do something with this,” so he decided to donate all of the money to a Children’s Hospital in Iowa. This garnered the attention of both Venmo and Anheuser-Busch, who said, “We’ll back you with donation matches.”
Soon, what was originally planned as a joke turned into a $1.1 million dollar donation. It was truly a story worth telling, and Aaron Calvin of the Des Moines Register wanted to be the one to tell it. He reached out to Carson about doing the story, and then set to work on what would surely be a piece about the better angels of humanity.
What would happen next would be the antithesis of that…
Like it or not, the modus operandi of today’s journalists is to not just tell a story, but to also background-check the people for whom their story is about. And where do you do that? Social media; more specifically in this case, Twitter.
As Calvin scoured King’s tweets, he found one from eight years ago, when King was sixteen and a sophomore in High School. Now deleted (as seems to be his entire Twitter account — smart move, btw), the tweets were originally jokes told by Daniel Tosh, a comedian known for pushing boundaries.
Full disclosure: some of Tosh’s stuff is really funny, and some isn’t. Basically, he’s like every other comedian I’ve ever seen… and I’ve seen a lot.
Now here’s where I differ from most in this: Calvin could have easily just run the story and absolutely sandbagged King and all the good work he had just done, but instead, he reached out to him. I don’t have a transcript of the conversation, but I have a pretty good idea of how it went.
CK: Hey man! How’s the story?
AC: Good, good. Hey listen, I know I’m not the morals police, but you should know that it’s standard operating procedure for us as reporters to look into someone’s background via social media. And, like, eight years ago, you posted a couple of jokes that are pretty racist by today’s standards. And because they’ve been on the web for so long, you could try to delete them, but that’s not to say that they don’t exist somewhere else. And I know that my editor is going to want to include them in the story, but nobody wants to make the story about these tweets per se, so we’re going to put it at the bottom of the page. However, as this is not the first time I’ve seen this happen in the media, and I know the potential shit-storm that’s about to ensue, you may want to get in front of it before we print it so that you’re proactive, and not reactive. Catch my drift?
CK: (silence)
Or something to that effect. So King did what he thought was the right thing, the honorable thing: he publicly owned his past, admitted his mistake, and offered to make amends.
Here’s the problem with that: in today’s society, remorse simply isn’t good enough anymore. Apologies mean nothing to the modern-day lynch mob. In a move that, let’s be honest, they had to do, Anheuser-Busch distanced themselves. They’re a huge company with huge influence, and they were caught between a rock and a hard place. They still agreed to donate the $350,000 they said they would, but that all future contact with Mr. King would cease. What they thought would be a nice thing married with good P.R. (which is what every company big and small dreams about) turned into a position where if they backed King, they’d upset “the woke” and invite a massive amount of backlash for insensitivity, and if they cut ties, they’d upset “those who are sick of ‘the woke’” and invite a massive amount of backlash for caving.
And woke-haters were ticked beyond words, so much so that they turned into the person they were publicly excoriating. Because you see, Mr. Calvin had a few tweets of his own that were considered unfit for humanity, and they were found by those scouring to find them, in response to Mr. Calvin scouring the tweets of Mr. King.
Pot, meet kettle.
So now where does that leave us? Well, Carson King’s life is over as he knew it, because instead of being known as the guy who turned a joke into something that could change the lives of others, he’s known as an insensitive racist. And Aaron Carter’s life is over as he knew it, because instead of being known as the guy who wanted to tell an amazing story of humanity, he’s the hypocrite who wrecked another guy’s life by digging up an old tweet, only to lose his job because of a messy old tweet of his own.
So in hindsight, not only did kindness not help, but it did far more harm than good. In fact, it seems that kindness has been doing that a lot lately. There’s an organization that leaves water near the border so that migrants who cross don’t die of dehydration. The problem is that it’s protected land, and it’s illegal to leave anything there. The people trying to make things better for those who have nothing have actually been arrested from time to time.
So maybe kindness just isn’t worth it. Maybe it’s time to set kindness aside for awhile and institute an “everyone for himself or herself” mentality. It would certainly save a lot of heartache, employment, and avoid potential incarceration.
Or…
… we could stop looking for the worst in people. Because that’s what we do, isn’t it? It has become an innate practice to stop looking for the good in others. I know that Carter didn’t set out to ruin King’s life (and his own in the process), but why was he searching Twitter in the first place? It wasn’t to see all the good things he did; he was looking for dirt, and that’s a huge problem because no one is innocent.
If we’re being honest, we’ve all done shitty things. All of us. Nobody has lived a fully clean life. Nobody has always stood up for injustice. Nobody has never laughed a joke that makes fun of any particular section of the population. Nobody has never been irritated by someone who cuts them off in traffic, and nobody has never been the cutter-offer.
But we never look in the mirror anymore, and I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because we won’t like what we see, or maybe it’s because it’s easier to point out the faults of others and living with the rationale that, “I’m bad, but that person is really bad!”
Or maybe it’s because we realize that more often than not, we’ve stopped being kind to one another. We’ve stopped being human to one another. We’ve stopped talking to each other. We ignore each other.
But then when we do talk and we realize that we may have a difference of opinion, we’re so convinced we’re right about everything, and on the right side of everything, and that everything has to have a side, and that if we’re not right then we’re failures and the other person somehow wins.
You know something? When we actually stop being kind to each other, we are failures. You and me. All of us. Nobody wins.
So what do we do?
For starters, we have to start reengaging with each other, and we have to stop making things some sort of peeing contest. We have to realize that we’re not always right, no matter how much we think we are, and that it’s not a bad thing to be wrong once in a while. It’s how we learn and grow as humans.
We also have to try to put ourselves into the perspective of how someone who is the polar opposite of me thinks. If I’m a Trump supporter saying that the Ukrainian phone call was a nothing-burger, I have to ask myself, “How would I feel if Hilary had said that in a phone call?”
(Sorry, she’s still the most polarizing name on the left.)
And if I’m a Biden supporter, I have to ask myself, “If Trump pressured a prosecutor to drop an investigation against a foreign company where Ivanka was on the board, how would I feel?”
(Sorry, he’ll always be the most polarizing name on the right.)
And here’s an even better idea: why don’t we just try to stop living in our politics and simply live in our humanity? The vast majority of us knows the right way to treat each other: to make the world a better place, to look for the good in others, to own our mistakes, to make up for them, and almost most importantly: to forgive.
Because if we don’t, it’s only going to get worse. And it’s already pretty awful.
