We are all Gus Walz

When I was in first grade, I briefly attended an Episcopal Day School in Carmel Valley. I don’t remember much of that year, but I do remember one song I very much liked singing: “They Will Know We are Christians By Our Love.” It was a modern guitar hymn, only a few years old, written by a hip priest for a post-Vatican II Catholic Church. Our teacher, Mrs. Hedrick, taught us to make the sign of the cross while we sang, and then open our arms wide, as if to embrace the world.

The most famous modern version of the song is here.

First grade for me was more than fifty years ago now, but the basic theology was clear. Your faith only counted if other people could see it in action. If you loved Jesus, you made other people feel loved. The way it took shape in my mind wasn’t that faith without works was dead (I didn’t know that verse yet), but that what mattered more than anything was how you made other people feel.  That might not have been the hymn’s intent or sound orthodoxy, but we hear what we want to hear – and it dovetailed very nicely with the message about manners and civility I was learning at home. 

Half a century later, I have adapted that hymn for every political discussion. When people ask me which side I’m on, or how I feel about this issue or that, I say – as winsomely as I can – that I’m far more concerned with how people fight than what they are fighting for. They will know we are Christians by our love, went the song, and the corollary is that we will know the justice of your cause by the means you use to advance it. 

Twenty years or so ago, I worshiped with the Mennonites – one of many stops on a long and winding spiritual peregrination. They were pacifists, of course, which I found fascinating, particularly because they saw pacifism as the radical insistence that ends and means must always be congruent.  Violent means lead to violent outcomes; peaceful means lead – in the longest of long runs – to peaceful outcomes. This was a matter of faith, but also a matter of practice. I met a young woman who had gone to East Timor with Christian Peacemaker Teams. She had been shot and sexually assaulted while deployed with CPT, but she had also helped, in a small way, to bring healing to a famously war-torn region. She gave a talk at church one day, and she reiterated something that has stuck with me ever since. “Nonviolence isn’t just about not harming others. Nonviolence is in the tone of your voice and the expressions on your face.”

My mother’s family raised me to believe that manners were essential, because they made other people feel comfortable. The Mennonites taught me that gentleness was essential, because that gentleness bore witness to the sincerity of one’s faith. I have a brain injury that makes it very difficult for me to process conflict. Put those three things in a blender and voilà: your correspondent, who is convinced that your tone is at least as important as your content.

And yet. It’s easy for me to attribute my views to brain injury or upbringing. I do it reflexively, because it makes those views radically subjective. Since I figure you will want to dismiss them anyway, I will save you the trouble of saying “You’re wrong,” and instead, allow you the kinder option of rolling your eyes and attributing my errors to a, um, a genteel farrago of trauma and privilege. That way we can stay friends more easily, because if my errors are the lamentable consequence of injuries endured, that’s easier than believing I’m being a willful or malicious jerk.

And yet. This isn’t an affectation. Someone needs to say that process matters at least as much as outcome, that means determine ends, and that a kinder, gentler nation will not be built through sarcasm, cancellation, mockery and cruelty. Someone needs to say it because it’s true.

“That’s my dad.”

If you’ve been on social media at all today, you’ve seen photos of Gus Walz, the teen son of the Democratic nominee for Vice-President.  Gus was tearful last night as his father spoke to the convention and the nation. Some on the right – not many – mocked him, perhaps not realizing that Gus is neurodivergent.  Many on both sides rose to Gus’ defense, and rightly so.  He seems like a sweet, lovable kid; the implication of many of the posts on his behalf was that he doesn’t deserve any calumny or cruelty.

That’s right, of course. Gus doesn’t deserve to be mocked.  But here’s the thing I know. Not just believe, or think, but know with a kind of certainty that comes to me only rarely:  We are all Gus.

Donald Trump is Gus, and Ann Coulter (who sneered at young Walz in a tweet) is Gus, and Bill Clinton is Gus, and Kamala Harris is Gus. These are adults, of course, and they have chosen to enter a political fray. But their choice to enter the fray as adults does not permission either our sadism or our sarcasm.  Gus cries openly, which is a lovely thing, but that only means that his insides and his outsides match very well. You may not wish to believe it of the people who disagree with you, or who advance causes you find reprehensible, but I assure you that they too are very much like Gus. Gus is us, and Gus is them, and if your cause is really about making the world a better, safer, more decent place than you will treat them the way you want Gus to be treated.

To paraphrase Michelle Obama, if they go low, you refuse to join them in the muck because you understand that the only way to get the right outcome is to use the right tools. The only way to build a genuinely kind society is to fight for it kindly.  And the best way to value Gus Walz is to see him in ourselves and in each other. Be eager for the fray if you must, but that eagerness to advance your cause does not require you to be cruel, to be cutting, or to stoop to the depths of your opponents on right or left. 

Your tone is your content. Your process is your outcome. Your means are the ends.

We are all Gus.