Power and Kindness—Do They Have to Fight? a consideration of the 1979 movie “Norma Rae”
Like many women, I once felt that the way I wanted to be kind and also have power were as different as oil and water, they didn’t mix. There were times I would want to do good things for people, and thought about being a missionary or joining the peace corps. Yet at other times I could imagine myself getting a tough man on a Harley Davidson motorcycle to melt in my arms. As a child growing up in Springfield, Missouri, I felt kind when a stray dog would come to our home, and I gave it food and a place to sleep. But I also liked the feeling of getting my dog Trixie to cower in front of me, and then I felt cruel and ashamed.
It was a revolution in my life when I began to learn from Aesthetic Realism that the only way a woman will feel that power and kindness do not have to fight, is if her purpose in every aspect of life—in love, at a job, with the family—is to want other people to be stronger through how she affects them. In Self and World Eli Siegel explained:
“The self does not want to be strong by the weakness of others. It wants to be strong by what it is, rather than by what others are not…… The fundamental, unremitting drive of every person is to be at one with things as a whole. To be at one with things as a whole carries with it some idea of power. And power is not just the ability to affect or change others; it is likewise the ability to be affected or changed by others.”
I will tell something of what I learned about the fight between power and kindness in my own life and in aspects of the 1979 movie, “Norma Rae.”
The Fight Between Power and Kindness Begins Early
As a girl I liked music and spent hours listening to records on my phonograph. On Saturday nights my grandfather and I watched gospel quartets on television. I thought it was beautiful how the distinct voices of four men—from the low bass to the high tenor—blended together. I wanted my voice to affect people well and I took voice lessons, sang in the school chorus, and performed musical skits for my parents in the summer with my girlfriend Donna. This was an example, I later learned from Aesthetic Realism, of my deepest desire: to like the world.
But I also was competitive. In 7th grade chorus I compared myself to other students thinking “Jane’s better than me, but I’m better than Cindy.” Meanwhile, I felt so unsure of myself that when the teacher asked me to sing a solo for a school assembly, I couldn’t. I didn’t think that being kind made me important. Having a big effect on people while feeling superior and unaffected was a fast thrill which I preferred more and more. At age 12 when my Grandmother Ellison gave me her credit cards, I felt powerful telling the saleslady to “charge it.” I bragged to friends that my family owned their own business, a nursing home. Yet in my mind the important thing wasn’t the care of the elderly residents or the working conditions of employees, but the fact that a portrait of me at age ten in a floor length yellow chiffon formal hung in the entryway for all to admire.
“Every person”, Mr. Siegel explained, “is troubled by the drive towards good power and by the simultaneous drive towards bad power.” Good power, he explained is “anything that makes you and the world more beautiful.” All bad power “comes from an insufficient love of what is not oneself.”
Real Love Puts Together Power and Kindness
In an Aesthetic Realism lesson Mr. Siegel described the power a woman can want over a man: “The more he needs me, the less I’ll need him. That is what a coquette means. The more men are moved by you, the less you want to be moved yourself.” That women go after this kind of power can be seen in the number of books with titles like “The Fine Art of Flirting” and “How to Flirt Outrageously, a Step-by-Step Guide to Bewitching a Man.” I was a flirt and didn’t need a book to learn how. I practiced how to have the most imploring look, how to toss my hair in that nonchalant way, and I would arrange to be in the right place at the right time for the right man to just “happen” to see me. Yet I didn’t see young men as having hopes and feelings when I called college fraternity houses and asked for Michael—there was always a Michael. I would pretend to be interested in him then hang up.
One night passing the barbecue grill at an apartment complex where I lived, I said in an alluring voice to a man cooking steaks, “apartment H15, medium well.” At one o’clock in the morning he showed up at my door and later there was sex. The advice I got from the women’s magazines I read, was to be liberated and join the “sexual revolution.” But they didn’t tell me why the next morning I felt so cheap, and why as I looked at myself in the mirror, I wanted to break it.
When I began to study Aesthetic Realism in 1979, I began to learn—and I love it with all my heart for teaching me this— hat the reason I didn’t like myself was because I wasn’t true to my deepest purpose—to be fair to the world and people. Instead, I was going after power that was based on contempt, the desire to lessen “what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.” In an early consultation I spoke about a man whose attentions I was desperate to get and said, “I would like to just deal with a man on a level that’s not this game business, you know.” They asked:
Consultants What in you stops you from being able to talk to a man in a way that you are proud of?
Are you a flirt? People either flirt or they’re honest. Which are you?
Donita Ellison Well, sometimes, either, both.
Consultants Does flirting give you more pleasure than anything else?
Donita Ellison I do get a pleasure out of flirting.
Consultants Do you think there’s a kind of mental cruelty in flirting as you show a man that
you’ve affected him and he has affected you and also hasn’t at the same time?
Do you think that most flirts are interested in power? Are you?
I was! And referring to my care for the art of sculpture, they asked: “What is the difference between the way you see men and the way you see sculpture? Do you flirt with stone and wood?” I began to learn that the power of art is always kind because its purpose is to be fair to an object, to see it with respect and form. And I began to be educated about what kindness truly is when my consultants read this definition given by Mr. Siegel in his “Definitions, and Comment:”
“Kindness is that in a self which wants other things to be rightly pleased…. A person is kind who feels a sense of likeness to other things; who accepts accurately his relation to other things.”
To see my relation to things and very much men, I was given assignments to write for example “Do I See Men Accurately?” “Ten Men I’ve Known and What They Really Think of Me” and “What I Can Learn from Men.” I studied men in literature, respected and loved for their strength and kindness, like George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Sydney Carton in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. I began to see that what a man most hopes for is like what I, or any woman hopes for—to have a purpose with the world and people that he likes himself for. And for the first time I felt it was possible to be deeply affected by a man and have a good effect on his life.
That today I’m studying together with my husband, Jaime Torres, in Aesthetic Realism classes, and learning more with each week what it means to be truly kind makes me proud and happy. I love Jaime, who is originally from Puerto Rico and who is a podiatrist, for his passionately wanting all physicians to study Aesthetic Realism and for the important articles he has written about how good will, the real thing, has to be the basis of health care in America. Jaime strengthens my life every day through his deep and kind humor, and his criticism which I’m happy to need to be the person I hope to be.
Before meeting Aesthetic Realism, the fight in me between power and kindness crippled my ability to truly care for a man. Many women have the notion, as I did, that love means being the most important thing in a man’s life. And this is what I felt in a previous marriage that ended in divorce. When I married my first husband, whom I’ll call Jim Travis, he was a sophomore in college majoring in economics, which I respected. For a person who had seen herself as a princess who should be taken care of, I felt proud getting a secretarial job so that he could devote himself to school full time.
But I also wanted to have my way. At a time when finances were tight, I talked Jim into using money he’d saved for a truck that he needed, to instead buy an antique roll top desk which I felt I just had to have. Determined, I told him “It was a steal” a chance of a lifetime, and just what he needed for his study. And I also said what women have used for centuries to have power over a man: “if you really loved me, you would want me to have it.” We got the desk, but I felt awful. He once told me, “Why do you ask me anything, you do what you want anyway.” I was worried about how narrow, selfish, and cold I had become, but I didn’t know how to change.
After college when Jim got a management job with a trucking firm, I felt we were flying high as we dined in fancy restaurants on the company expense account. But when he got fired for objecting to how the company wanted to fire a man close to retirement because his age was slowing down work, which Jim felt was unjust, I was not kind. Instead of showing how much I respected him for doing the right thing, I gave him the message that my life was ruined, and it was his fault. Bitterly I wept about whether we would be able to afford our lake cabin and how to tell friends the humiliating news.
Years later in an Aesthetic Realism class, Ellen Reiss, Chair of Education, whom I love for her great good will, brought new comprehension about the bad power driving me at this time in my life as she asked:
Ellen Reiss Did you want to see how much you could get away with?
Donita Ellison Yes, I did!
And she explained what every woman needs to criticize in herself in order to be truly kind: “How much a woman would like to kid a man along, have him adore her and also tyrannize over him, is something to study.”
The Fight Between Power and Kindness in Norma Rae
I speak now about aspects of the film which won the actress Sally Field an academy award for her deep and radiant portrayal of Norma Rae. Based on a true story, it is about the fight between power and kindness as labor organizer, Reuben Warshowsky, played by Ron Leibman, tries to organize a union among the overworked and underpaid workers of a textile mill. Good power can be distinguished, Mr. Siegel explained, by asking:
“‘If this desire of mine was to be successful, and I have power over this person, would the world look better and would the person himself or herself be stronger?’ Any power that a human being has over another that doesn’t make the person it is exerted on stronger, and the world in which the power takes place look more beautiful is bad power.”
We see this bad power in the mill owners as they try to grind out as much work as they can while giving the workers as little as possible. Exploiting the fact that the mill provides the only jobs in this small Southern town, the working conditions are brutal. Men and women labor in stifling heat to the deafening roar of machines, while cotton dust permeates the air causing brown lung disease—which we learn has recently caused the death of one of the workers.
In Norma Rae we see a young woman worn down by hard work trying to eke out a living for herself and two children. A relation of spunk and resignation, we see that she is mixed up about power. We learn that there have been many men in her life. With a mingling of triumph and scorn she says about one man, “I climbed in the back seat of his Cadillac one rainy night six years ago… and got myself my little Craig off that Southern gentleman. He hasn’t done anything worthwhile since.” And her father says to her: “Some Tom, Dick and Harry comes to the front door and you’ve got your hat on in no time.” But Norma Rae also shows the self-doubt and disgust a woman has, as I did, in going after this kind of power. After an affair she tells a man: “It just doesn’t sit well with me anymore George…. It just doesn’t make me feel good.”
At the mill Norma Rae has spoken out for better working conditions, longer break time for workers. To shut her up the mill supervisor gives her a promotion and flatters her saying “You’re going up in the world honey.” And we see something of the struggle in her. The job is to time the productivity of mill workers. She knows the job won’t make her any friends because the purpose is to weed out the slow workers. But she needs the extra $1.50 an hour. With clipboard and stopwatch in hand we see her walking about the mill with an air of importance, discomfort and shame, timing people as they work. When snubbed by coworkers Norma changes and tells the boss: “I was greedy… and I’m sorry, so you just go ahead and fire me.”
I respect her decision to choose kindness over an ugly power. At a time when my father said if a union tried to organize the nursing home he would put it down, I didn’t object, even though I saw how hard the employees worked for minimum wage with no benefits. I didn’t want anything to interfere with the profit-sharing check I got. And while I hadn’t done anything to earn this money, I selfishly felt it was my due. I am so grateful now to have feeling about people getting the economic justice they deserve. And I love my mother Beverly Burk, my colleague in the study of Aesthetic Realism. As a nurse, she worked passionately for justice to people during the 1985 1199 Health and Hospital workers strike in New York City.
Norma Rae comes to see that a person is either on the side of justice or exploitation and greed and she joins Reuben to help organize the union. She asks the minister to use the church for a union meeting for both black and white workers and if he doesn’t stand up for justice to all people says she’ll leave the church flat. His cold answer is, “We’re gonna miss your voice in the choir, Norma.” To which she replies “You’re gonna hear it raised up some place else!” And we do!
In the most dramatic scene of the movie, we see Norma Rae as both powerful and kind because her purpose is for the lives of people to be stronger and better off. She writes the word UNION in big letters on cardboard and jumping onto a table holds it up high above her head, turning in all directions for everyone to see. The camera pans around the mill and we see the faces of the workers, tired and hot, watching, waiting, trying to make up their own minds what to do; and the only sound is the deafening roar of weaving looms. The workers are deeply affected by Norma Rae’s courage and determination. And that effect has powerful results as we see the hand of a worker pull a lever to shut down a loom. Then another, and another. One by one the machines are shut down until the last is silenced with a final hiss of steam. In the final scene we see the union has triumphed.
Aesthetic Realism Taught Me: Beauty Is the Oneness of Kindness and Power
Aesthetic Realism taught me that kindness and power will work together in proportion to how much a woman wants to respect the world outside of her. This is what I am fortunate to continue learning, together with Jaime. At a time when he was doing important research, I had the feeling “where am I in all this?” Another time when he asked me to accompany him to an appointment without profusely saying how much it would mean to him for me to go, I jumped at the chance to feel I was being taken for granted, unappreciated. In a class when I spoke about this, Ms. Reiss asked me if I was sure Jaime Torres had been so inconsiderate, and she said: “There can be a taking for granted… [But do you think you can also look for trouble?]… Do you feel persons should come to you on bended knee and then you will be gracious?
This described what I felt! It was what I had done with my parents and grandmother—acting like a little princess—and seeing this made it possible for me to have a different purpose. Part of this was feeling I wanted to study Spanish in order to know my husband better, and also be able to communicate with his family in Puerto Rico. In a class, Ms. Reiss asked me: “Do you think that in learning Spanish, you’re closer to Dr. Torres?” I said, “Yes.” And Ms. Reiss said something I have seen as true with every month, and so useful to me as a high school teacher of art and as a wife: “The more you like beauty meaning a lot to you and the opposites meaning a lot to you, the more you’ll like Jaime Torres meaning a lot to you.”
To conclude, I comment briefly about one of the most beautiful examples of power and grace in the history of sculpture—the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Power, said Mr. Siegel as I earlier quoted, “is likewise the ability to be affected or changed.” This work of 190 BC from ancient Greece, has moved people all over the world, as it does me.
We see Nike the goddess of victory, striding forward with wings massive and outstretched. We feel the force of wind as her garments swirl energetically. So different from the way I once tried to be statuesque, wanting to have an effect while hiding and remaining intact, she seems to be affected to her very center, where that diaphanous garment reveals the delicacy of skin, womanly curve, the power and tension of muscle. And all of this is carved magnificently in marble. She is yielding and strong, forceful and responsive. I believe she represents the aesthetic victory that every woman hopes for.
“All beauty,” explained Eli Siegel, “is a making one of opposites and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.”
The education of Aesthetic Realism provides the knowledge that can enable every woman to feel, that kindness and power can work together in the everyday moments of our lives.
A portion of this paper was published in issue #2072 of The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known titled “Good Power or Bad—the Criterion.”
Read Eli Siegel’s definition of Kindness from Definitions, and Comment: Being a Description of the World.
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