WIRTW #788: the 'it's a beautiful day' edition

When I was a kid, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood wasn't background noise. You sat on the floor. You watched. You waited for him to come through the door, change his shoes, and pull on that cardigan. Nothing flashy happened. No one was mocked. No one was humiliated. No one "won."

And yet, by the end, you felt steadier.

It took me years to understand why. Fred Rogers wasn't just entertaining children. He was teaching empathy—carefully, intentionally, and without irony. Which is why I keep coming back to this thought: we need a sociological study comparing the empathy of adults who grew up on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood with those who didn't.

Because empathy feels like the missing muscle in American society right now.

Every episode opened with a simple, disarming truth:

"I like you just the way you are."

Not if you earn it.
Not if you agree.
Not if you fit in.

Just: you matter.

That idea once felt obvious. Today, it feels almost subversive. We sort people by usefulness, loyalty, productivity, and tribe. Empathy gets rationed. Compassion gets qualified. Caring about the “wrong” people is treated as a flaw.

Rogers never hedged.

"You are worth caring about."

That's where empathy begins. And when a society stops teaching that lesson, it doesn't become tougher or more realistic. It becomes colder—and easier to harden.

Rogers also understood that empathy requires emotional literacy. You can't recognize pain in others if you've been taught to deny it in yourself. On his show, he talked openly about fear, anger, sadness, and loss—not to inflame them, but to name them.

"When we're frightened, we tend to lash out at others."

That isn't politics. It's human behavior. When empathy erodes, fear rushes in. And fear doesn't make people wiser or stronger. It makes them reactive.

Rogers' answer wasn't suppression or denial. It was honesty.

"The thing that is mentionable becomes manageable."

That lesson applies to adults as much as children. Societies that can't talk honestly about discomfort don't become resilient. They become brittle.

Empathy also shapes how we see one another.

"The neighbors you find are the neighbors you look for."

If you go looking for threats, you'll find them. If you go looking for people, you'll find those too. One path leads to suspicion and withdrawal. The other leads to restraint and connection.

And empathy doesn't require unanimity.

"We don't have to think alike to love alike."

That sentence feels almost antique now, which should worry us. We increasingly treat disagreement as disqualification and difference as danger. Rogers offered a quieter alternative: coexistence without dehumanization.

He never framed empathy as weakness. He treated it as a civic skill—something to be taught, practiced, and protected. A society held together by empathy doesn't need as much fear or force to function.

Which brings us to where we are.

The erosion of empathy doesn't just harden people; it makes them easier to lead by fear. When compassion is framed as weakness, it leaves a vacuum. And something always rushes in to fill it.

So yes, fear still matters. But it's a consequence, not a cause. Fear is downstream of the deliberate erosion of empathy. When people are taught not to care, cruelty becomes easy. And when empathy disappears, bad ideas don't have to work very hard.

Fred Rogers never talked about politics. He didn't need to. He was doing something more basic: teaching children how to live with other people without losing their humanity.

America didn't lose its way because we cared too much.

We lost it because we stopped treating empathy as a strength.

Empathy isn't softness. It's social infrastructure. It's our superpower. And any culture that mocks it shouldn't be surprised when things start coming apart.

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Here's what I read this week that you should read, too.

Just Subpoena It.

This week, the EEOC sent a strong message to corporate America when it went to federal court to force Nike to turn over years of documents tied to allegations that its DEI programs discriminated against White employees.

The EEOC isn't suing Nike for discrimination—at least not yet. Instead, it has filed a subpoena enforcement action after Nike allegedly refused to fully comply with an investigation that reaches back to 2018. According to the agency, Nike's "DEI-related 2025 Targets" and other initiatives may have resulted in race-based decision-making in hiring, promotions, layoffs, internships, and mentoring and leadership-development programs.

Union activity Is not a license to be abusive at work

Let's get something straight right out of the gate: employees have the right to organize. They also have the right to complain about work, staffing, and management decisions. What they do not have is a free pass to be abusive, vulgar, and demeaning toward coworkers and supervisors—union campaign or not.

That's what makes the Starbucks case now pending before the Fifth Circuit so frustrating.

When does $5,000,000 not equal $5,000,000?

Elizabeth Graham worked as a benefits generalist in the human resources department of Bristol Hospice Holdings. She filed (and later withdrew) an EEOC charge alleging age and sex harassment. A couple of months later, during an acquisition integration, the company accused her of blowing off a training assignment (and then lying about it). The VP of HR terminated her — allegedly for insubordination and falsifying what happened.

A federal court jury just awarded her $5,000,000 in punitive damages, on top of $75,000 in non-economic compensatory damages. That punitive award will never last.

WIRTW #787: the 'accidents will happen' edition

"I think you just hit somebody."

That's what Mitch Goldstein said to me one cold morning in the winter of 1990. It was our senior year of high school, and I was driving us to school.

I had felt the bump.
"A car?" I asked.
"No," he said. "Some body."

He was right. My car had clipped a person—Delores Ritchie.

I was turning left from Audubon Ave. onto Tomlinson Rd. It was cold, and the windshield of my parents' powder-blue Subaru wagon was still partly iced over. Tomlinson runs east–west, and as I turned into the eastbound lane, the rising sun's glare blinded me just long enough.

Ms. Ritchie had the same problem. She had pulled over about a hundred feet past the intersection to scrape ice off her windshield. She was standing in the lane of traffic, on the driver's side of her car, when my passenger-side mirror clipped her.

I never saw her.

The police came. She left in an ambulance. Mitch and I went to school.

A few months later, as I left the public library next to George Washington High School, there she was—Delores Ritchie—standing at the circulation desk, chatting with the librarian.

I walked toward her to ask how she was doing, and then I heard this: "I was in an accident. A car clipped me and knocked me to the ground. I'm OK, but my lawyer wants me to keep going to doctors to run up my damages."

True story.

I slipped past her without being seen. I went home and told my dad what I'd heard. He told our lawyer.

The lawsuit disappeared.

Here's the lesson: if you're involved in litigation, watch your mouth. You never know who's listening—or when it will matter. Every offhand remark is potential evidence. Today's small talk can end your case tomorrow.

As for car accidents, that one was my first, but not my last. My daughter, Norah, away at college, was just in her first. To hear that story (and I promise it's just as good), listen to this week's episode of The Norah and Dad Show, available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Overcast, Amazon Music, in your browser, and everywhere else you get your podcasts.

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Here's what I read this week that you should read, too.

If you can't force older employees to retire, how do you succession plan?

Employers face a legitimate—and growing—problem: if older employees aren't retiring on schedule (or at all), how do you plan for leadership transitions and future staffing needs without committing age discrimination?

The answer starts with recognizing that today's workforce doesn't retire the way it used to. Many employees expect to work past 65, often for financial reasons or because they want to stay active and engaged. Employers who build succession plans around outdated retirement assumptions are setting themselves up to fail.

What doesn't work (and is illegal) is pressure. You can't demote older employees, cut their pay, strip responsibilities, or make their jobs unpleasant in hopes they'll "choose" to retire. That’s not workforce planning—it's an age discrimination constructive discharge claim waiting to happen.

So, what does work?

Mangement discussion of an older worker's "retirement" as age discrimination

"When are you retiring?" That's not an employer's call to make.

Here's a rule that employers still manage to forget or ignore: the decision about when to retire belongs to the employee. Start nudging. Start hinting. Start asking. Start factoring it into employment decisions. And you're flirting with, if not outright committing, age discrimination.

An Ohio appellate court recently reinforced that lesson in Selzer v. Union Home Mortgage, reversing summary judgment for the employer and sending an age discrimination case back for trial.

Greg Selzer was a 64-year-old loan officer assistant. According to the record, his supervisors repeatedly pressed him about his retirement plans. Then came the email that mattered most: a vice president involved in the termination decision wrote that Selzer "keeps saying he will retire but hasn't." Another executive admitted that the purpose of that email was to justify why Selzer landed on the reduction-in-force list. And another employee confirmed that Selzer's proximity to retirement factored into the decision to terminate him.

The trial court bought the RIF explanation and dismissed the case. The court of appeals did not.

A plaintiff can prove age discrimination claims by direct or indirect evidence of discriminatory intent. In this case, the appellate court made clear that repeated inquiries about retirement when made by decision makers and tied to a termination decision qualify as direct evidence.

Yes, courts have said that merely using the word "retire" isn’t automatically discriminatory. But context matters. Here, the comments were frequent, made by supervisors, closely tied to the discharge, and—most damning—used as a justification for termination.

The employer argued it was just planning ahead. And believe me, I get it. When an employee eventually does retire, without proper succession planning, you could be caught off guard, scrambling to replace institutional knowledge and forced into a rushed and risky replacement decision. Courts, however, remain skeptical, and often recognize that "longevity" is just a proxy for age. Changing the label doesn't change the motive.

The takeaway for employers is simple:

Don't ask when employees plan to retire.
Don't speculate internally about retirement timelines.
And don't document retirement assumptions in RIF decisions.

Let employees retire when they choose. Support them in that decision. (I offer some tips on how to do that here.) Employees decide their retirement date. Employers don't get to decide for them—and those that try may find themselves staring down the barrel of an age discrimination lawsuit.