Apparently the author of the story (Tom Junod) had the reputation of...not exactly doing hatchet jobs on people, but using snark and innuendo to cut down famous figures (the one he references is Kevin Spacey, though I guess Spacey's serious flaws were well-known, even at that point).
And yeah: why send this guy to write about one of the most universally-beloved figures in America? What's he gonna do? Is he going to find the secret flaw in Mr. Rogers and exploit it? Is he going to make the man ridiculous?
In fact, what happened was: Mr. Rogers befriended someone who was apparently an angry, and somewhat self-hating man, and probably changed him. (Junod somewhere makes a comment about Rogers having been his first real friend, which is kind of a sad thing to contemplate, seeing as Junod was 40 when he met the man).
Though when someone who was...probably a skeptic....basically says "yes, he was as good a person as people imagine he was," that's something. It's one thing for someone who is generally loving to say "oh, that person is such a good person;" I feel like it's another for a curmudgeon to acknowledge that "this person is a good person."
But something else Junod wrote about....about an unpopular (conservative) politician being booed and harassed by people when she attended a screening of the documentary about him, and about how he doubted Mr. Rogers would approve - that the person in question was a child once, and that perhaps we do owe people, even people we think of as terrible people* some degree of civility. (And I don't think screaming at someone or being rude or vulgar is going to do anything to win over their heart or their mind: vote them out of office, work hard for agencies/groups that work to undo wrong. But if we begin - I think - thinking it's okay to use the heckler's veto anywhere in the public square, it will just spread and metastasize and I suspect it would end with things like a professor who "gives" "too many" Ds in their class being unable to go to the grocery store unmolested**)
(*all people have the capacity to do terrible things; there are probably very few genuinely terrible people around. And we're all capable of being cruel; I've seen it. Heck, I've done it - more when I was younger than now, but there have been things I said to people nearly 40 years ago now that I STILL think of with regret, because they were cruel and absolutely needless and were merely aimed at me trying to maybe be a bit more popular with kids who would actually never accept me)
(**Hate to say it but one of my classes this semester is not doing well at all. Part of it is a critical mass of people not putting in the work - not doing the homework)
The author also makes some comments about social media, and how Rogers would probably have partaken even as he would have been deeply distressed by some of the trends. (After all: he went into television to try to combat the terrible things he thought it was doing for children) He makes the comment about "hate is more viral than love" and as sad as that makes me, yes, I think it's true. Maybe love still does win in the end....but hate, like lies, has run twice around the world while love (like truth) is still tying its shoes. It is an easier human impulse to be hateful, I think. Especially to those who are not like you. It is much more challenging to look at that other person and say "I don't understand you, I don't understand what motivates you. But I am going to try to love you all the same"
Junod also wrote about "how would Mr. Rogers respond to some of the awful violence we see?" (Well, he was still alive when Columbine happened, and while he was nearing the end then - he died on my birthday, in 2003 - he was around for September 11). But of course, there have been many horrific shooting since then. But Junod notes:
Though an indefatigably devout man, he did not attempt to characterize the shootings as an attack on the faithful; instead, he seized on the news that the 14-year-old shooter had gone to school telling his classmates that he was about to do something “really big,” and he asked, “Oh, wouldn’t the world be a different place if he had said, ‘I’m going to do something really little tomorrow’?” Fred decided to devote a whole week of his television show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, to the theme of “little and big,” encouraging children to embrace the diminutive nature of their bodies and their endeavors—to understand that big has to start little.
That's an interesting idea: what if people said "I'm going to do something really little" and I presume that is meant in the sense of "rather than wanting to make a splash, be the big man, be the Joker dancing on those steps in Brooklyn....what if I just went about my life? Or what if I strove to do one thing to make things better?"
One way I get down on myself a lot (especially these days, when some days doing what I NEED to get done is the absolute maximum I can manage. And yeah, I'm giving it until mid-January and if I'm not back to what I consider a better level of functioning by then, I may investigate chemical means to try to GET me more functional again, because feeling small and stupid and like you can't do anything worthwhile is for the birds.) is that I don't do MORE. That nothing I do is very big these days - heck, nothing I've done has been very big (especially not compared to the "expectations" made of a "borderline gifted" kid like me). And, I don't know. I wish I could feel like the little things I do are enough....maybe doing a little good thing, even if it's just little, is still better than doing a big bad thing.
But anyway. Junod comments:
"It isn’t that he is revered but not followed so much as he is revered because he is not followed—because remembering him as a nice man is easier than thinking of him as a demanding one."
I remember reading either a translation/simplification of one of Kirkegaard's essays, or someone writing about Kirkegaard's thoughts on Christ, and running across something very, very similar: that Christ has many who are his "fans" but comparatively few real followers - because to seriously follow Christ as a very difficult thing. And yes, it involves behaving in a loving way to even people that many would regard as enemies.
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