Reprinted
from The Rock Island Argus, Rock Island, IL, September
22,
2003, and the Tennessee Tribune, Nashville, TN, Sept.
18-24,
issue. Appeared in the on-line Forum of the Thoroughbred Times, Lexington,
KY.
Seabiscuit
Shows the Power of Kindness
by Nancy Huntting
Most people do not
think kindness
is powerful. And most nations don’t either. In 1970, Eli Siegel, the
great
American educator and founder of Aesthetic Realism, stated passionately
in a lecture on economics — “I say that the whole purpose of history is
to show that the greatest kindness is the greatest power” (Goodbye
Profit
System: Update, Definition Press, NY). I think the movie Seabiscuit
is evidence for this, and that its huge popularity shows people are
thirsting
to see that kindness is not a soft, weak, ‘nice’ thing— it has
might
and pizzazz!
The film, about
the brave race
horse who stirred all of America during the Great Depression, shows
that
kindness not only can bring out astonishing power in a horse, but
brings
out possibilities in people around him that might never have been!
Nobody saw what
that little
ornery horse, who apparently loved to doze in the shade half the day,
had
in him — until wrangler Tom Smith came along and tried to understand
him.
Real kindness,
I’ve learned,
is not gush, or sacrificial. Mr. Siegel defined it as “that in a self
which
wants other things to be rightly pleased,” and he wrote:
“A person is
kind who feels
a sense of likeness to other things…. to be kind, we must have the
imagination
arising from the knowledge of feelings had by others…. Kindness is
accuracy….
To know a thing as it is, is to give it its due…”
In this film,
Seabiscuit’s tremendous
success stands for the kinder America that came to be under The New
Deal
of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: where every person was seen as deserving
to have a home, a job, decent food and clothes, and the best in him or
her brought out!
"The desire
in America for a respectful economics
exists unquenchably
whatever goes on
in Washington, whatever is in the news.”
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It is now 2003, and
economics in America
has failed. In lectures he gave in the 1970s, Mr. Siegel showed that
the
profit system, in which men and women — and, yes, even children — are
seen
as existing for the enrichment of owners and stockholders, is based on
contempt, “the addition to self through the lessening of something
else.”
The contempt at the basis of economics has caused massive suffering and
massive inefficiency, like the recent blackout. Ellen Reiss, Class
Chairman
of Aesthetic Realism, describes the outrage in Americans when she
writes:
“Today there
is this tremendous
feeling in people: ‘We want to work on a basis that is respectful of
us!
We don’t want to be seen as profit-producing mechanisms for someone, to
be paid as little as possible and discarded!’ This desire in America
for
a respectful economics…exists unquenchably whatever goes on in
Washington,
whatever is in the news.” [The Right of Aesthetic
Realism
to Be Known, 2/5/03]
Our economy will recover
only when it
is based on good will, “ the desire to have something else stronger and
more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more
beautiful."
Watching Seabiscuit, I felt — that is what is happening to the men who
work to have that unlikely horse win against the mighty War Admiral, in
one of the most remarkable races in history. Each of them becomes
“stronger
and more beautiful”!
This film goes
along very deeply
with the most important question for America now, which Eli Siegel
asked:
“What does a person deserve by being alive?”
Nancy Huntting is
a teacher on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation
in New
York
City, and writes and speaks on women in history and today. She grew up
near Cincinnati and loved to ride and visit the horse farms in Kentucky.
Rosalie and
Author
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