I have a massive amount of respect for Border Czar Tom Homan because I truly think he's a very kind man, and he proves it daily. The issue is that it looks nothing like what we're told kindness is.
To explain what I mean, I want to get a little philosophical with you for a moment, and I think by the time you read what I have to write, you'll probably agree with me and maybe even see things you've always thought about a little differently.
Ever since I was a kid, I was told to "be nice" to other people. To be nice was to be the most moral one could be in the modern world. Yellow smiley faces adorned t-shirts, buttons, and bumper stickers, reminding everyone to be nice to one another. "He's a nice guy" is a compliment you'd hear about others when someone was looking for a descriptor to give to someone they either hardly know or don't care enough to know anything else about.
But the more you think about the term "nice," the more it feels like a hollow word. If you really stop to think about the act of being "nice," and consider what it is to be "nice," the more you start to feel uneasy about the term.
For starters, "nice" feels hollow because it... kind of is. Nice is a mask you put on around strangers, or something you wear during client meetings. In polite society, you act nicely to give off the impression that you're in like company and are safe and agreeable enough to have a passing conversation with. Nice is oftentimes not your actual emotion in the moment; it's an act you adopt to keep things civilized.
But if you go back to the origins of the word, you realize the term "nice" is, itself, a mask for an actual state of being. "Nice" has Latin roots. It started as "nescius," which means "not knowing," or "ignorant" if you want to modernize the meaning. It evolved in French to the word we know it today, but the definition meant "foolish" or "stupid."
It wasn't until around the 1600s that the word "nice" evolved to mean something along the lines of "polite" or "agreeable."
I wanted to tell you this little bit of history because I want to highlight how "being nice" is something of a lie we perform for each other, and that in the Western world, we sometimes take it as a virtue in and of itself. "Being nice" is something you have to do in every situation, lest you stop looking like being on level with everyone else and adopt the status of outsider or pariah.
But being nice isn't actually a virtue, because a lie can't be a virtue.
Kindness, however, is a virtue.
Or, at least it is when used properly. It always starts with empathy, but real kindness doesn't stop at empathy. If it did, it would be "niceness." Kindness is empathy that morphs into accountability.
To give you an example, I'll refer to the man who ordered us to be kind all the time, and that's Jesus Christ. He spoke of being kind to one another on multiple occasions, but one thing He did not do was tell us to be nice, especially in the context of how we understand the word today.
If you go through many of the stories in which Christ interacted with people, He both instructed and demonstrated kindness with accountability. In John 8:10-11, He told the woman accused of adultery that while He did not condemn her, she should "go, and sin no more." He didn't shrug off her adultery, as it appears by his final words to her that she was actually guilty, but he forgave her sin and told her to stop doing it.
John 5:13-14 saw Jesus heal an invalid, whom he then told not to return to sin lest something worse happen.
Kindness is care, but it's also being real with the person you're giving care to. It's being there for them in their time of need, but not mincing words when it comes to accountability.
Getting back to Homan, the job the man is doing is kind in almost every degree, it just doesn't look like it because he's having to mix it with an element of hard reality. He clearly loves this country, and he wants to keep its citizens safe. He works very hard to make sure that the innocent people, his people, who died and suffered because of issues brought on by lesser men and women, don't happen again, at least while he can help it.
So he's rounding up people who have little to no respect for this country, who came here illegally and uninvited. He's throwing them on planes and sending those planes to foreign nations. His work oftentimes looks brutal; people have died from it, and he's sometimes smiled and joked about the rage that his job creates in people, but both he and the men and women of ICE and the Border Patrol are doing something that will save lives and help Americans.
Homan and his agents aren't being nice. Certainly, there are moments where they look cruel and uncaring, but they're flipping tables that were erected in places they shouldn't have been. They're driving out the riffraff with a whip. It comes from a place of righteous anger, but it's not cruel. The point was never cruelty. It was kindness to the people who were suffering from the cruelty this foreign elements brought with them.
Being nice is something you do in social settings to keep things civilized, but civilization will collapse if we base it all on niceness. When the hard decisions need to be made, kindness in its purest form is the way to go. It won't always look nice, but if you're being kind in the proper way, it's not supposed to.