Kindly Persuasion Works Better Than Outrage
When Abraham Lincoln was 33 years old, he gave a speech inside a Presbyterian church to a temperance society. His message: The assembled ought to be nicer to drinkers and sellers of alcohol, rather than shunning them, or denouncing them as moral pestilences. Indeed, they ought to use “kindly persuasion,” even if a man’s drunkenness had caused misery to his wife, or left his children hungry and naked with want.
By morning, he had decided he needed somewhere nobody cared about theater, someplace where the name Chekhov was more likely to be mistaken for a rifle than a playwright.