There’s a subreddit called r/LeopardsAteMyFace. The premise is simple: people post stories about individuals complaining about the consequences of their own choices. A husband whose wife has been detained by ICE — and he voted for this. The comments pile on: you got what you deserved. This is what you voted for.
I’ve been watching this dynamic play out everywhere lately. And I think it’s precisely the wrong way forward.
I’ve been thinking a lot about cruelty. Working on the book, trying to find the central thesis — what’s the one thing I actually want to say after fifty years of living and learning and processing — I kept coming back to cruelty. I thought: cruelty is worse than any of the seven deadly sins. All of them are bad, sure. But cruelty is something specific. It’s the rubbing in of someone else’s misfortune. Even — maybe especially — when they brought it on themselves.
We hear the phrase cruelty is the point a lot these days. We say it as if naming it makes it acceptable. As if giving voice to it is enough.
I’ve been listening to a podcast lately from Nish the Fish, a yoga teacher I follow. He did an episode about language and signifiers — how our names for things are like pointers in programming. When you say the word “table,” you’re pointing at a concept. You can’t put anything on the word table. You can only put things on a table. But there’s an interesting exception: the name of God, in many traditions, isn’t just a pointer. It is the thing it names.
Apply that lens to cruelty. The word doesn’t just point at something bad — it sounds like what it is. Say it out loud: cruelty. There’s a beautiful, terrible onomatopoeia there.
But here’s where I’ve landed after a long conversation with my friend Reinhold this week.
I don’t want my book — or my own mind — organized around cruelty. Even in opposition to it. Because if your central thesis is defeating cruelty, you’re still living inside the word. You’re still orienting yourself toward the thing you’re trying to move away from.
So I’ve been turning it over. Mercy is the opposite of cruelty in some ways. Compassion gets closer. But what I keep landing on is forgiveness.
Forgiveness for others. And forgiveness for ourselves.
Think about two ways of responding when someone makes a choice that ends up hurting them.
The first: You did that to yourself.
The second: I’m sorry that happened to you. How can we fix this?
Just sit with the difference in how those two responses feel. One is satisfying in a cheap way — like scratching a mosquito bite. The other requires something of you.
The Gita teaches that we’re supposed to do our duty without any expectation of reward. I think there’s a corollary: we should allow the actions of others to unfold without demanding punishment. Without needing to be the ones who teach the lesson.
The man whose wife was detained didn’t need anyone on Reddit to remind him of his choices. Life already did that. What he needs — what we all need — is someone willing to sit with the discomfort of the situation without weaponizing it.
Right now, everybody is suffering. Some more than others — that’s always true. But there’s this human pull toward: if I must suffer, let others suffer more, and let their suffering be caused by their own choices. It’s seductive. It feels like justice.
It isn’t.
My hope — my prayer, honestly — is that we can find the wisdom to forgive. Not because the choices people made were good. Not because the consequences aren’t real. But because the alternative is a country that keeps piling on, keeps pointing fingers, keeps mistaking cruelty for accountability.
The hard way is the right way. And the hard way is this: I’m sorry that happened to you. What do we do now?
When are we going to start learning to forgive?