I appreciated an article that was published on Yahoo.com soon after the presidential election in November featuring a series of interviews with President Obama conducted by The New Yorker's David Remnick.
The focus was how the president talked to his teen-age daughters, Sasha and Malia, about the outcome of the election and about a man who had spoken so viciously about him, so crudely about women, so maliciously about the disabled, and who had so little respect for telling the truth.
Once again, President Obama, an articulate and thoughtful man, focused on "kindness and respect and understanding."
What I say to them is that people are complicated. Societies
and cultures are really complicated…This is not mathematics; this is biology
and chemistry. These are living organisms, and it’s messy. And your job as a
citizen and as a decent human being is to constantly affirm and lift up and
fight for treating people with kindness and respect and understanding. And you
should anticipate that at any given moment there’s going to be flare-ups of
bigotry that you may have to confront, or may be inside you and you have to
vanquish. And it doesn’t stop…You don’t get into a fetal position about it. You
don’t start worrying about apocalypse. You say, O.K., where are the places
where I can push to keep it moving forward.
"The President’s words can certainly help in a time when many
parents are wondering how to talk to their children about what the future holds
in the face of a Trump administration," Remnick remarked.
