The View From Planet Kerth: Consider how the other shoe might feel

Decades ago, when I became the head varsity coach of a top-level high school team, Coach Sullins gave me the most important advice he could offer.

He had coached his underdog basketball team to the state championship a few years earlier, but his advice had nothing to do with X’s and O’s since I coached girls’ soccer, not basketball. His comment applied to any sport — and, in fact, to virtually every aspect of living in a contentious, competitive world.

“You’ll have to make decisions in the best interest of your team,” he told me, “and no matter what choice you make, you’ll deal with players, parents and fans who will think you are wrong.”

Well, that seemed obvious enough. All players on the bench want to get into the game, all parents want their own kids to be at the center of the action and all fans who have never played the game know more than players, parents and coaches combined.

But then he passed on this bit of wisdom:

“Whenever a parent comes to me to gripe that I’m not giving his kid enough playing time, or I’m not playing him in the right position, or I’m not giving him a big enough leadership role, I listen to all he has to say and then I say to him: ‘You know, if I were in your shoes, I would feel the same way.’”

Coach Sullins paused — just as he would pause after saying it to a disgruntled parent — to let it sink in.

“It changes the conversation,” he explained. “I’m not telling him I’m right and he’s wrong. When I tell him he’s right to feel as he does, and that I would feel the same way in his shoes, I remind him how we’re both alike, although our situations differ. The discussion changes when you find something — anything — you can both agree about. And when you honor what it must feel like to wear his shoes, he stops to consider what your shoes must feel like.”

Over decades of coaching since then, I found that he was right. Even if you plan to move ahead according to your best judgment regardless of dissent, nothing is gained by digging in your heels and saying: “I’m right; you’re wrong.”

But gulfs may be spanned by saying: “I understand and respect why you feel as you do. I would feel that way, too, if I walked in your shoes. Nonetheless….”

I haven’t thought of Coach Sullins in a while, but I couldn’t help but recall his insightful advice when I listened to President Donald Trump’s recent speech in Saudi Arabia, in which he said of our struggle with Islamist extremism: “This is not a battle between different faiths, different sects or different civilizations.”

No, he explained, “This is a battle between Good and Evil.”

We are on the side of Good, he said, and if our side does not win utterly and completely, our failure “will be judged by God.”

I thought the speech was historic, as in: Wasn’t this the pep talk we heard in 1095 at the start of the First Crusade? And at the start of each of the eight Crusades that followed it?

Despite Trump’s protestations to the contrary, we most certainly are in a battle between different faiths, sects and civilizations, and we are in this millennium-old mess because extreme, rigid minds of every stripe insist on framing our differences in absolutes like “Good” and “Evil,” invoking a deity who wills us to obliterate the other side.

Good and Evil are extremes draped in religious cloth with no middle ground. And the president’s use of such extremist rhetoric — identical to the rhetoric the other side uses to define us — only fuels their recruitment narrative.

Should terrorists be hunted to their death? Of course. But they should die for their crimes against humanity, not because they are “Evil.”

Faiths, sects and civilizations are human-spawned institutions which can all change if we will them to. It is these institutions that are responsible for starting wars, and for ending them. That which is created by man can be shaped by man.

But once the battle is viewed as divinely ordained, with each side’s role in it absolute and unwaverable (“a battle between Good and Evil…judged by God”) it is easier for combatants to deny the innocence of any soul on the other side — even children, like those killed at a Manchester concert the day after the president’s speech, or the busload of Christians slaughtered in Egypt four days later.

The murder of innocents is intolerable and unthinkable by any civilized person — but it takes some mental sleight-of-hand to believe that only agents of Evil would walk in those shoes.

America killed 200,000 innocent noncombatants with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, most of them women, children and the elderly, since every able man was deployed elsewhere. We incinerated 25,000 innocent noncombatants with firebombs over Dresden.

Acts of “Evil”?

Most Americans would call it a necessary (or at least justifiable) extremism. In our shoes, we found reasons that made the slaughter of innocents tolerable.

And as Islamist extremists grow increasingly desperate in the face of defeat, is it really so hard to understand how they find justification to murder our innocents, believing it is we who stand on the wrong side of Good and Evil?

So does our president help or harm our cause when, rather than urging all sides to quell religious, sectarian and cultural extremism, he spouts language identical to the rhetoric of Islamist extremists: “This is a battle between Good and Evil” whose failure “will be judged by God”?

Because if you were a young Islamic man being courted by extremist leaders to wage holy war, what would you do after hearing a speech like that?

The madness will never end until simple-minded fools the world over reject the delusion that some deity wishes them to shed blood in the name of “Good” and “Evil.”

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The author splits his time between Southwest Florida and Chicago. Not every day, though. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Why wait a whole week for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Get T.R.'s book, 'Revenge of the Sardines,' available now at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other fine online book distributors. His column appears every Saturday.