For me this project is an effort to rescue good from its relatives nice and kind. Nice is the form of manners that avoids conflict through the use of faint praise. “Nice car!” one might say to the friend who bought a shiny something or other, but all new cars look nice so you can shelve all your concerns for down the road. My problem with kindness is I am never sure if my tendencies toward kindness stem from simply being a good person or being a coward. Kindness can go either direction. Parenting usually forces the issues of kindess as you teach children the concept of boundaries. I settle on the word good as the foundational term to describe what the core religious traditions point to when they describe the posture one must take toward the one life your name will have on this planet. I don’t think one could call the prophets and central religious figures nice or even always kind. But they all discussed love in the hard terms of courage sacrifice or selflessness. Kindness and nice are both several notches below the discussion of radical love.

“Oh Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz”. Janis Joplin knew what she was singing about when she wote that nonsense lyric. Hannah Arendt’s use of the terms ‘bannister’ is where I went to describe good in this project as having bannisters. Her controversial insight as I see it was that evil is characterized more by an absence of empathy making cruelty seem like another tool in humanity’s tool box. We all sail closer to evil than we think. Cruelty is in every instance the front door to evil. And the decisions we make can result in cruel outcomes for people. To hold your nose and turn your eyes from the consequences of your decisions (or votes) is deliberate ignorance and deliberate ignorance in a democracy is the propellent into the dark times ending that democracy

That is why I am doing this “Don Quixote” project. Good decisions can not be founded purely on the nice and kind frosting of selective ignorance. Loving your neighbor demands more and working democracy even more than that.