One of my favorite Springsteen tunes begins with the lyrics,

“Born down in a dead man's town,
The first kick I took was when I hit the ground,
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much,
Till you spend half your life just covering up.”

There’s a lot of insight about human nature in that verse. Multitudes of people live their lives “covering up” for fear of being kicked again - in one way or another.

Many of us have had the experience of reaching our hand toward a puppy - to pet it - only to have the puppy flinch, or shy away, looking with wide eyes at our outstretched hand as if it were expecting to be smacked in the face.

Dog’s do that. You can almost always tell when a dog has been hit. They are suspicious of any gesture toward them. And, as much as they crave affection, they wince at the hand that is outstretched to give it.

Previous pain and hurt have that effect. They reflexively send up red flags - even when there is no cause for concern in the present circumstances.

My intention may be to lovingly pet the dog’s head. Problem is, the dog doesn’t know that. And the problem is compounded if the same person who pets the dog’s face smacks the dog’s face. Then they never know what to expect.

On the other hand many of us have had the joy of caressing a baby’s face and seeing it turn toward us.

If you don’t have kids there’s this stage with many of them - right after they are born - where they really aren’t focusing on you yet. They “look” at you but it’s not a look of recognition. It’s more of a gaze. Then one day, you look down while you’re changing them or feeding them or bathing them and you see these bright little eyes focused on you. Your reaction if this happened to you may have been what mine was with my daughter. The day she finally “saw” me, my heart about burst with love and all I could say was, “Well. Hello there sweetheart.”

Until a kid reaches that “able to focus on you” stage it’s incredible to see how caressing their soft little faces causes them to turn toward you. Caress a baby’s face and they respond by turning in the direction of the loving touch.

I used to work with kids a lot. I absolutely love kids. You can tell when a kid has been hit and you can tell when a kid has been shown kindness. Not just physically, but emotionally as well. The kids who have been hit “flinch.”

That doesn’t mean these kids don't fully respond to love - though many of them have a tough time doing it. “Flinching” means that they have stuff behind their eyes. Hurts and heartaches that make the kindness they are shown bittersweet by comparison to the hurt they have felt so deeply.

I’ve often had the kids I talk to line up for “noogies.” (A “noogie” is a technical term for rubbing the top of a kid's head with your knuckles). And looking down in their eyes you can sometimes see whether the kindness they want to show and receive is bittersweet (due to past or present hurt) or simply a pure unmixed joy.

When the Easter break began a few years ago, I saw a kid from my daughter’s school (whom I’d talked to many times) standing behind me in line at the store with his mother. After returning the kid’s high five and hand shake I introduced myself to the mom. The first thing his mother said to me - in front of her son - was how hard it was going to be on her to have him hanging around the house for those 12 days instead of him being at school.

My heart felt sick but I understood more clearly why this was a kid whose eyes always seemed to “flinch” at kindness and who was regularly in trouble.

Some of us describe ourselves as “brutally honest.”  I’d like to see that definition exterminated or at the very least neutered. I have to confess, the phrase “brutally honest” sounds nearly like an oxymoron to me.

What good is the truth to anyone if it’s delivered brutally? Is there a reason the most painfully honest truths cannot be offered with loving, caring, compassionate, words - designed to win the heart rather than to alienate it?

There is one who speaks like the thrusts of a sword but the tongue of the wise brings healing.

I believe we should save our hard words for governments, entities, and individuals who show gross disregard for human life by practicing deceit with murderous intent.

I believe life threatening issues like AIDS, poverty, child abuse, violence against women, racism, human rights, war, global warming, endangered species, and the like deserve to be addressed in the strongest terms possible while the governments that ignore such issues, or pay lip service to them, should be spoken to in the most direct fashion.

But even then, our desire should be to win the hearts of those who hear us whenever possible - not to alienate them. Better to turn the face toward us than to cause it to flinch when it sees us coming.

I believe it pays huge dividends to thoughtfully consider what impact and effect we have upon others. We must never compromise the truth. But we should also endeavor to speak it from a motivation of love.

We can’t ever change the pain and heartaches we’ve been allowed to suffer in this life . But we can dramatically change the course of people’s lives by seeking to never inflict those same kinds of pains and heartaches upon others.

When all is said and done we are either people who cause folks to “flinch” or turn toward us. And if our words must be strong and deliberate - resulting in our hearers wincing a bit - let them at least be certain our desire was to turn their face in kindness not to slap it away in anger.


_{Painting: “Fardeau Agreable” (“Not Too Much to Carry”) by William Bouguereau; French Academic Classical painter, frescoist, draftsman & teacher; 1895}

_{Song lyrics" "Born in the U.S.A."; © Written by Bruce Springsteen; 1984; Columbia Records.}