Brendan Kwiatkowski PhD

Did you know about this fifth F? Flocking is not unique to guy culture, it’s also hyper relevant to the social development during the pre-teen and teenage years.

Discussing the discrepancy between individual values and group behaviours is one of my favourite things to discuss, address, and do role-plays about in my workshops.

I wrote most of this a few months ago—as a way to help me process (for my own sake) the atrocities going on in the world. And in light of the Epstein file documents and the Tumbler Ridge mass shooting, this poem feels extra pertinent. The last two lines are both a “prayer” of sorts as well as a reminder for myself.

Was I always this sensitive?

I used to love watching criminal minds late at night
—serial killers, blood, brutality—
Didn’t seem to bother me.

But now? Now I can’t even read news articles about children dying without tearing up or losing sleep.
And if there’s pictures? I find myself unable to hold their gaze.

Was I always this sensitive? Or did something happen to me?��Was it when I became a father?
Was it going to funerals of children?
I remember, after one of those, I went to comfort my friend,
And when she saw me, she wailed as we embraced,
Saying “Brendan, my daughter is dead.”

Maybe I’m sensitive because I’m haunted by that memory
but maybe we need to be haunted sometimes.
Maybe this hauntedness is sacred, an invitation to remember,

That Maybe I was always this sensitive, and I just forgot?

A famous poet once looked at the beauty of nature and remarked—for all of this, how are we not moved?

I have the same question when I look at how we respond to suffering.
A lethal combination of numbness, of justification or worse,
advocating for more violence and greater suffering in response.

Were we always this calloused?
Is this simply the evil human nature I was taught exists inside all of us?
�Maybe, but I don’t think so, because
I remember why callouses form.

We are calloused because we are sensitive.
And each of us, in our own ways, and to varying degrees,
learned to treat our sensitivity as a liability rather than as a guide. ��I don’t hate our callouses,
But I do hate the stories we make up about them—
When we valourize them and pretend that callouses are the real world
While ignoring the sensitive truth underneath.

That our callousness proves our sensitivity.

So may we remember that we were always this sensitive,
and that our world needs it. �May we be haunted by the inconvenience of humanizing others.

Did anyone else have a history teacher like this? For the record, I tried to be very intentionally of how to pull this off in a way that didn’t cause undue stress for students.

If you don’t watch to the end, the potential takeaways are: if you want to be a tyrant, get people to not take your tyranny similarly. If you don’t want authoritarianism, take tyranny seriously—perhaps especially if packaged in a non-serious manner.

What are your thoughts?