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.
He was tired of carrying her weight. Her financial choices and responsibilities. Her alcoholism. And he knew she was tired of his drug abuse and laziness and porn addiction. And Train played. And the guy kept talking. “Thing is, man… if it weren’t for divorce, I’d have student loans.”