Shame

No multimedia today, just words, one word really: shame. If you watch Game of Thrones, you will have a distinct visual image to go with this word, but it's an image I will not put on this page, because it's R-rated.  There is a scene where Cersei Lannister is compelled to make a walk of penitence from the Sept of Baelor to the Red Keep through the streets of King's Landing. Her hair has been cut off, her clothes taken and she must walk through the crowd of people who hate her and throw filth at her, while a Septa (a nun-like character) rings a bell and shouts, "Shame."
If you don't watch the show, you need to know that Cersei is not a good person, she is conniving and power-hungry and really someone that you generally hope gets what's coming to her.  Except, somehow, when this happens to her, I actually did not feel any sense of justice.  It's weird really, because the whole sequence didn't really change Cersei for the better. In fact, if anything, it made her harder and more spiteful than ever.  But for a moment I did actually feel bad for her, maybe because the visuals were so striking, but also because, I think, shame is such a deep, dark human emotion, that there is very little in a fictional tale or in reality that can make you detach from it, unless you are an actual sociopath.
Most of us have at least one powerful experience of Shame in our lives, some folks practically live there, and all of us pretty regularly experience Shame's nicer little sister, Embarrassment, on a pretty regular basis.  This, I think, is the reason it becomes such a powerful motivator in our behavior, and for the most part, does not really need explanation. Shame is the shadow of pride, the more proud of something you are the greater your shame will be should that pride fall.  For instance, I feel no shame when I lose a footrace, because I  have never been fast, I do not aspire to be fleet of foot, and the fact of the matter is that life requires very little actual running of me.  If someone is faster than me it is not a source of shame, because I have not pride about that particular aspect.  However, if I am proven to be ignorant of something I feel I should know: shame.  If I am negligent in my duties in life: shame.
Which brings me to the point, the thing that I think we should all feel some shame about in the world today: kindness.  Not entirely abandoning the Sci-fi theme from yesterday there was a sequence in the Christmas episode of Doctor Who, where the Doctor is about to regenerate and he is trying to give advice to the next iteration of himself.  If I were able to do such a thing, I would like to give myself and pretty much anybody who cares to listen the same advice:

Always try to be nice, but never, ever fail to be kind.

It's writing like of that sort that I really hope the new folks taking over the Doctor Who franchise manage to hold on to.  You don't always have to be nice, sometimes you can't, you're cranky, you're afraid, you're just plain tired, maybe someone just doesn't deserve niceness, but they always deserve kindness.  That is what I think explained the strange incongruity of emotions I felt about Cersei's walk of shame, it wasn't kind.  She didn't really deserve nice, she really is a pretty unrepentant character, but the blatant imposition of shame seemed too far, and in the end, it proved more dangerous than kindness would have been.
I worry that, in many areas of life, religion perhaps most of all, we have been too free with the shame.  We shame people for being poor, we shame people for how they look, we shame people for what they do to make a living, we shame people for their personal sins, we shame people for simply being human. We shame people and we claim that we're doing it, "for their own good."
I have seen people with a veneer of nice, impose shame like that bell ringing Septa and those filth flinging peasants.  You can be "nice" and use shame as a weapon, but you cannot be kind and do so.  Kindness recognizes that shame will happen without assistance in most cases, and when it does offers a hand of solidarity or, better yet, a glimmer of grace.
I would like very much to live in a world where I am ashamed of fewer things, and that involves working to make things different.  I don't want to be ashamed of the way my culture treats people like things, so I will act in a way that affirms human dignity.  I don't want to be ashamed of the way my church fails to be Christlike, so I will work every day to be more loving and forgiving.  I don't want to be ashamed by failing to be kind, especially on those days when I just can't muster nice.  I know most often, my kindness fails when I think something is unjust, and on those occasions when I am correct about the injustice, I need to search earnestly for the way to apply kindness to that injustice.
Not always an easy mark to hit, but one worth trying for.