Finding kindness

A lesson in how not to be fooled

Waving a conductor’s wand in pre-magic years. Tom Kinslow on styrofoam organ.

When I teach magic, one of the first principles I divulge is this: The larger motion hides the smaller motion. It’s why we magicians wave our arms — your eyes are attracted by the motion of one hand brandishing a magic wand while the magish grabs something from her pocket she can later make “appear” at an opportune moment.

Now, this is just between you and me. I’m trusting you. Please don’t tell anyone.

My young students love this concept. It is probably the single biggest secret they remember from our magic lessons together. And I have wondered why, of all the sleights and subterfuges I teach that they seem to forget, this one sticks.

I suspect it’s because, perhaps on a subconscious level, we human beings know even at a young age when we’re being snookered. We may not know how we’re being taken for a ride, but we know something’s amiss. So when my students learn that the visual noise of an abracadabra moment keeps them from seeing what is really happening, they think, aha. That’s how the world works. Sometimes grownups don’t want you to see what’s really going on. Maybe that’s why they yell.

Right now in our country there is a whole lot of bamboozling going on, much of it coming from a wannabe emperor holding court in the Oval Office. We are in a time of extraordinary social and political upheaval, where an unelected billionaire is literally waving his arms in a Nazi salute and a failed casino owner-turned-politician is constantly waving executive orders for the obedient cameras of the feckless corporate media (a scene repeated from his first term in office, when political commentator Bill Maher remarked on those “super-classy leather binders that look like the menu at Beefsteak Charlie’s”). President Musk and his orange sidekick are saying look over here so we might not see what is happening over there.

This morning The Guardian pointed out that images of past ICE raids flooded the internet following the inauguration to create the illusion of thousands of immigrants being picked up and deported right now. Turns out they’re from past administrations both Democratic and Republican, at least one dating back as far as 2008 when Barack Obama was president (“US immigration is gaming Google to create a mirage of mass deportations,” February 6, 2025). Back at the Resolute Desk, the seat of democracy, the blitzkrieg of firings and outrageous announcements (annexing Canada and Greenland, taking the Panama Canal by force, turning Gaza into Mar-a-Lago), while not to be taken lightly, are also meant not only to intimidate but to befuddle.

Don’t be fooled.

Congressman Jared Moskowitz, the delightfully irreverent U.S. representative serving Florida's 23rd congressional district, has referred to T**p as “the distractor-in-chief.” Other commentators, such Ezra Klein of the New York Times and substacker Dan Pfeiffer, have picked up on this theme. Pfeiffer writes that T**p is at heart a performer, a poseur whose arm-waving masks a chaotic and incompetent administration. In a podcast titled, “Don’t Believe Him,” Klein sums it up adroitly: “T**p is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president.” I urge to you read both of these pieces. They are as reassuring as they are enlightening.

So what do you do when someone is trying to fool you? I can tell you what to try during a magic show: When the conjuror is pointing toward something or otherwise directing your gaze a certain way, you might try looking in the opposite direction. That’s if you are hell-bent on not being fooled. I actually don’t recommend this, for two reasons: One, the pointing may be legit and looking elsewhere may not reveal any secret maneuver; and two, whether you catch the magician out or you miss part of what they are presenting, you will spoil a moment of magic for yourself.

In this new era of political legerdemain, however, looking elsewhere can be a saving grace. Don’t let all the pages from the fascist playbook that are fluttering down upon our nation distract you from looking within to the brave, righteous and loving person you have never stopped being. They can take away the National Archives, the DEI programs, even our Constitution, but they can’t take away your soul. Maybe that comes as cold comfort right now, but it is as good a toehold as any to sanity and to inner peace. Remembering that you own the property deed to your house of belonging, that you are your own secretary of the interior, and that you yourself are a treasury of love and giving, can help you remain steadfast and standing on holy ground. And holy ground is solid ground.

Above all, do not forget to be kind — to yourself as well as others. In his new book, The Magic of Hope, magician and teacher Robert E. Neale writes that at the age of 95 he is still having, as he puts it, “adventures in kindness.” An ordained minister, Neale was for many years a professor of religion and psychiatry (I love that combination) at Union Theological Seminary, but he is known to magicians as one of our preeminent inventors and philosophers. After describing a trick with cards called “Partners in Possibility,” a playful conceit where hopelessly mixed pairs of cards inexplicably match up again because of the hope of possibility, Neale offers “Kindness,” a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye, as a kind of coda.¹ Nye’s poem speaks of loss as a necessary precursor to discovering perhaps our most deepest possession, a process we may all be going through right now.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

One other point to make about the waving of arms to distract you from how the trick works — or, in the case of the new regime, how we work. When the magician waves his wand or his arm, he is actually covering a point of weakness in the trick. He is hiding the fact that he has to do something quite unmagical in order to perpetuate the illusion — for entertainment purposes only, of course — that he is all-powerful and capable of performing real miracles.

Just as it is that when the magician says look over here we should look over there, when the new administration announces yet another nail in the coffin of democracy we should look within to that place where we are still truly free. That is how to break the spell of the illusion that The Little Shop of Taxpayer-Subsidized Horrors is all-powerful. That is how to shatter the myth that the emperor has new ill-fitting clothes, no matter how many times he posts images of his tough-guy glowering face as if he were the hero in a cheap graphic novel on the remainders table.

In this unfolding crisis where those professing to follow Jesus more closely resemble the brood of vipers John the Baptist warned everyone about, even the smallest acts of kindness can feel like acts of resistance. I recall how right after the 2016 election, people seemed to make extra efforts to treat each other more kindly. People seemed noticeably gentler. Back then it was to achieve balance against all the xenophobia and chaos coming out of the White House. This time, with women, people of color, Palestinians, and our transgendered siblings specifically targeted as offensive to the white Christian nationalist patriarchy, every act of kindness is like driving a stake into the heart of the vampire. So grab your hammer and be kind. Remember that much of what is going on, while very real, is meant to preserve the illusion of power. Ironically, those who love unconditionally hold the real power, and you know what they say: Don’t poke the labradoodle. The more they have to wave their arms, the weaker they may be.

1. In Words Under Words: Selected Poems. Portland, Oregon: Far Corner Books, 1995.