A season of kindness is too short

COLUMN GOSIER E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published December 3, 2002

On the day before Thanksgiving, the beginning of the season of kindness and love, much of the Tampa Bay area woke up appalled.

Someone in Largo had taken advantage of an octogenarian couple's frailty and tried to rob them, killing the man in the process. The woman, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease, was battered, but worse, left to fend for herself alone and grieve the loss of her constant, lifelong companion.

Across the bay, Hillsborough County learned that it is a strong candidate for being the seat of hate and meanness, heralded as the state's leader in reported hate crimes. Law enforcement folks tried to soften the news by claiming the designation had more to do with their efficiency in reporting such crimes than with the area being more prolific in them. But they didn't need to try to cover for themselves. They don't have a lock on belligerence.

Largo fired a Fire Department lieutenant last month for using racial slurs. Its neighbor St. Petersburg fired its police chief a few months before that for comments many interpreted as racially derogatory, comparing a struggling black suspect to an orangutan.

But such news, no matter how accustomed to it we have grown, seems more out of place in a time when words like giving and kindness and love are rolling off so many tongues. This is a time when we expect taking and meanness and hate to take a vacation. Unfortunately, the opposite happens.

Officer Johnny Harris of St. Petersburg's Crime Prevention unit is stepping up his efforts as the holiday season gets under way. Invariably, the season of giving also is the season of taking.

Harris' explanation for it is not at all esoteric, and he could have been talking about any other of our brethren in the animal kingdom. "Basically there are three factors," Harris said. "Desire, ability and opportunity."

The outstanding distinction between us and, say, wolves is that because of our higher intellect, we don't need the excuses of hunger or territory to savage one another. We have the abstract thinking ability to dream up motivation: You have money, and I don't, or your skin is different from mine, or your parents were born in a different country, or you worship in a different way.

Our lives are segregated year-round by that kind of thinking. And it is naive to think that a few weeks of declaring peace and goodwill should make a dent in the trend.

It seems sometimes that the few weeks of kindness are used as absolution to clear the rest of the year for being brutish, inconsiderate louts. Charitable organizations that turn away excess volunteers during the holiday season plead for them the rest of the year. Hungry people who have a host of options for a good meal during the holidays draw caustic glances as they scrounge for food the rest of the year.

I do not knock the holiday spirit, the spirit of giving, the spirit of compassion, of love. I knock the reality that it is a holiday spirit, something reserved for a certain time of year, something we pull out like decorations, then stick back in the box for the rest of the year.

I even knock myself for entertaining the notion that somehow our inhumanity to each other is more despicable during this time of year than at some other time. Robbing and murdering an 80-year-old is just as abhorrent in July as in November. Hating someone in November because of their ethnicity or religion is no more ignorant than disparaging them in March.

Maybe it seems worse, then, because for a short while, a mere few weeks, some of us try to say we're somebody else. Some of us try to believe we are. And for a few weeks, some of us really are. And it seems an affront to have our momentarily retooled goodness assaulted. We are offended that someone would take advantage of our few days of being trusting to steal from us, that someone would catch us with our guard down and punch us, that someone would take advantage of our kindness and abuse us.

Desire, ability and opportunity.

Officer Harris' simple equation for holiday crime explains so much of who we are year-round. If we want something and have the ability to get it, we make it ours. From the mugger on the street to the mugger who heads a corporation, desire, ability and opportunity determine what we get.

But here's a novel twist: How about letting desire, ability and opportunity determine what we give? And not just for the holiday season.

Instead of taking someone to lunch whom you're trying to impress, take someone who's hungry. Rather than talking bad about someone you don't like, say something nice to them.

Get into the spirit of giving and stay there. It may rub off on others.

But until it does, watch your back.

-- To reach Elijah Gosier, call (727) 893-8650 or e-mail gosier@sptimes.com.

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