Be Pleasant (March 13, 2005)

"What's so hard about being pleasant?"

I may have heard somebody say that once, but now I have picked up that phrase as my own and toss it out from time to time when I witness (or hear about) someone being rude. Last week for example I read in Sports Illustrated about churlish baseball manager Frank Robinson, whose "needle is sharp. Recently, upon meeting a young team employee new to baseball, Robinson turned to a relative veteran and said dryly, 'He won't last.'"

Was that necessary, Frank? Would it really have been all that hard just to extend a hand of welcome to the new guy and say, "Glad to meet you"? Casual courtesy strikes me as a pretty easy virtue. Diligence and sobriety and chastity and heroism might be tough, but smiling and saying hello is a "gimme" - a matter of simple moral arithmetic in a world of hard moral calculus. I'm reminded of what Pastor Rick Warren said about how easy it is to serve as a host for one of his Purpose-Driven Life studies: "All you have to do is be nice to people!" Warren rightly assumed that being nice to people was so elementary that just about anybody could do it.

Even kids can be nice. My son Peter warmed my heart the other day by saying that he had gained an online reputation for being nice to "noobs" - novice players in a video game that he was good at. The game pits somewhat randomized teams against each other, sparking the occasional complaint from a skilled player, "Oh expletive, we've got a noob on our team." Peter types in, "We were all noobs once. Embrace your inner noob." There you go, son. Keep up the good work.

As you examine yourself for this virtue, do not assume that just because you are pleasant and courteous to some people, you are therefore pleasant and courteous. No, you have to be that way all the time. Hardly anyone is constantly nasty to everybody. Hitler was nice to his dog. I have known people who treated me with tremendous consideration and deference but who then turned around and spoke to their own family members with cruel insults and profanity-laden contempt. Maybe they were nice to me, but they were not nice.

The writer for Sports Illustrated said of Robinson, "He's a crank, God bless him." Well, ok, God bless him maybe but I'd really rather that God reform him. I don't like cranks. They make it hard for me to be kindly disposed to them. Don't be a crank. It is not that hard to be pleasant.