Super quick author’s note: This was a hard one to write but I’m proud of this one. But I hope my next one is a little more easy breezy Covergirl. Anywho, hope you enjoy.
Just over a month ago, on September 10th, 2025, while on my morning commute to work, I finished listening to the audiobook of Maxwell King’s The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers. I’m a bit of a Fred Rogers superfan, so I already knew most of what was in the book. It was a great and informative read (or listen, as it were) about one of my favorite humans, though so I was glad to have listened to it.
But there I was in dense South Austin traffic, listening to this great book about a great man. For those unfamiliar with Austin’s highways and byways, our road infrastructure is painfully inadequate for our nation’s 13th most populated city. So, it doesn’t take much to turn any commute into a slow moving, rage inducing war of attrition between me and thousands of my fellow Central Texans. There are too many cars, too few lanes, and too much hot Texas sun coming in through the windshield. As much as we like to pretend we’re on equal footing as Houston or Dallas, at the end of the day we’re a big city cosplaying as the cool hip small town we’ve either always been or once were before all the Californians started moving here, depending on who you ask.
And for those unfamiliar with how I am behind the wheel of a car in bumper-to-bumper traffic, imagine a vintage Macho Man Randy Savage promo where he’s trash talking Hulk Hogan to Gene Okerlund. Or maybe I’m more like the Ultimate Warrior going all roided out, vein bulging berserker mode. I don’t know which wrestler I’m more like. It’s been a few decades since I was a booger eating wrestling fan so I’m fuzzy on my analogies. Maybe it was the traffic. Maybe I was running late to work. Maybe I was just hungry and in need of snapping into a Slim Jim. That’s Macho Man. That I know. Regardless of the reason, I was hotboxing my car with all kinds of pent-up (and surely unhealthy) road rage.
Meanwhile, coming out of the speakers was the kind and patient voice of LeVar Burton narrating how the kind and patient Fred Rogers stayed true to his mission of being kind, patient, and radically present for those in his life, even while an aggressive form of stomach cancer ate him alive from the inside out. The dichotomous irony of road raging out while listening to an audiobook about Fred Rogers wasn’t lost on me. But seriously, Austin drivers, either use your turn signal or pick a fucking lane.
Later on that same day, after taking my lunch break outside to enjoy the still hot but within a breath of being “nice” weather we get every September, I opened my phone to check the news one last time before going back up to my desk, only to see that conservative pundit Charlie Kirk had been shot while speaking before a large crowd at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. A sick uneasy feeling formed in my gut. This is bad on several levels. I knew that instantly.
I’m a Marxist, if by “Marxist” you mean I have a politics that falls somewhere between the radical ideas of Karl and the anarchistic absurdism of Groucho (with a hint of Richard thrown into the mix). So, it’s safe to say I was not a fan of Charlie Kirk or his political agitating masquerading as political debates on campuses across the country. But regardless of my feelings on his politics, there was nothing good about his death. This was a bad, horrible thing. And my thoughts and prayers immediately went to his friends and family, as well as to anyone who witnessed the shooting firsthand.
A few minutes later, as I scoured Twitter for more details on Kirk’s murder, I inadvertently saw the video of Kirk’s murder in all its social media high-definition nakedness. It was one of those moments where I knew exactly what I was watching the split second it started autoplaying on my screen, but the side of my brain that was saying “look away” lost out to the side of my brain that always looks at car crashes on the freeway as I drive past them. The gravity that pulls me to gawk is strong, even though every time I do it, I can hear my father’s voice in my head warning me that “whatever violence you choose to view will be in your head forever.”
But my dad was right. Along with every awful thing I’ve ever viewed on Al Gore’s Internet, the image of Charlie Kirk’s death is in my head now. And it probably always will be.
I put my phone down, took a deep breath, and stood up from my desk. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but I was in full-fledged fight or flight mode, and I couldn’t just sit at my desk while all these thoughts and feelings coursed through my body. Flight was winning. Stand up. Move! Because I work at a news radio station, though, the first thing that caught my eye as I stood up was a headline scrolling across a nearby television showing images from yet another school shooting somewhere in America, this time in Colorado. Wounded children were being evacuated to local hospitals. High school students were hugging each other under the flagpoles of their school. It’s a sight we’ve all grown too accustomed to over the last 25 years. I remember breathing a sigh of relief that (so far!) the only death was that of the shooter, a 16-year-old kid who turned his gun on himself. A sigh of relief that it could have been worse, but still… a sigh of relief over a dead child.
A couple weeks ago, while sick with an illness that felt like a bad case of Covid but ultimately wasn’t, I started an essay about how we commemorate dates, which then morphed into an essay about how I made it through my parents’ divorce with the help of popular entertainment. Like a lot of things I write, I set out with one idea in my head only to end up writing something different as the words started spilling out.
Since it had been about half a year since I had written anything, I began that essay with a lengthy “author’s note” talking about what I was up to in that timeframe and why it had been so long since I had written anything. The more I worked on that essay, the more I kept coming back to that author’s note. The eventual essay I wrote was just north of 4,000 words. Since the author’s note was an additional 1,000 words on top of that, I deleted it and just let the essay exist on its own terms.
I was proud of that author’s note, though. It was a good essay in its own right write and it was hard to delete it, not going to lie. But at the end of the day, it was a thousand words to say something I probably could have said in just a few; as a sensitive person who has big strong feelings on matters both big and small, I’ve been having a hard time just existing in a world that feels increasingly cold and overrun by mean people doing mean things at all times. And at the end of the day, it’s hard to feel creative when you feel overwhelmed by the weight of so much pettiness and so much meanness. See? I didn’t need a thousand words for that.
Fred Rogers. Charlie Kirk. Dead kids. All on the same day. These are all unrelated events.
I’m a bit of a Fred Rogers super fan. But before I was a Fred Rogers super fan, I was just a Fred Rogers watcher. I was born in late 1977. By the time I was watching television in, say, I don’t know, early 1978 or so (‘tis but a joke, mom), we had a lot of great options to choose from, but two stood out over all others; Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Shout out to Public Broadcasting! Because our brains are hardwired to pick a favorite thing when presented two or more options, I would have to say that I was predominantly a Sesame Street kid.
Sesame Street was easily the cooler of the two shows. It was then; it probably still is now. If we were going to be staring at the TV all day, why not watch a show with irreverent Muppets and amazing guest stars? If you were going to be taught how to count, why not learn from Count von Count? Kermit the Frog is going to teach us the alphabet? Sign me up! Who could forget the Pointer Sisters’ “Pinball Number Count” song or going to the grocery store to pick up a “loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter” (or “butta,” if you’re pronouncing it like the adorable kid in that clip) or any number of other songs or clips from that show? Sesame Street was bright, and it was colorful. Sesame Street was fun, funny, and at times, could be incredibly and devastatingly heartfelt. It had monsters that lived in trashcans! What’s not to like? Sesame Street felt bigger and more important, even to my young brain, which made it appointment television for children everywhere.
Everything that Sesame Street was, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood wasn’t. I wouldn’t classify Sesame Street as a loud show, but it did have Chaos Muppets such as Grover and Ernie throwing a wrench into otherwise chill situations on a regular basis. Mr. Rogers’ voice barely got much louder than a whisper. Even when Fred Rogers made a mistake on the show, there was no chaos taking place. It all felt very controlled, calm, and organized. Wasn’t uncommon to see dope ass kids on Sesame Street wearing the same turtlenecks shirts and bellbottoms pants you’d see other kids in your own neighborhood wearing. There’s nothing particularly “cool” about Mr. Rogers and his cardigan sweaters and his slip-on loafers. Sesame Street had performances by people like Stevie Wonder, Paul Simon, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and Johnny Cash. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’s predominant music was performed by Johnny Costa. Look, I’m both a jazz fan and a Mr. Rogers nerd, and Johnny Costa is an amazing artist (did you know each episode’s opening theme song had a different improvisation over it???), but he wasn’t exactly a name most people would know. Both shows employed puppetry, but there really is no comparison between the Muppets and the homemade puppets Fred Rogers used on his show. The Muppets all had different voices and different personalities, making them all feel a little more real and a little more accessible than the Fred Rogers puppets, which were all designed and voiced by Rogers himself. Both shows had pre-taped segments (who can forget the classic episode where Mr. Rogers showed how crayons are made?) but the Sesame Street segments were so varied and artistic that they really felt like their own unique thing.
Although these two shows had a friendly rivalry with each other, it’s important to say that they were not in opposition to one another in any real way. The creative minds behind both shows admired each other and what they were both trying to do. Fred Rogers guest starred on Sesame Street and Big Bird made his way into the Neighborhood.
So, I’ll repeat but invert the sentence I wrote above; Everything that Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was, Sesame Street wasn’t.
The common thought now is that Sesame Street is where you went to learn about letters and numbers and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is where you went to learn about emotional intelligence. Although I bristle a bit at that thought (both were happening on both shows), I do think there’s a lot of truth to that sentiment. Sesame Street was designed to show you a day in the life on a busy urban street, with some educational stuff happening throughout. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was a little more intimate and a little more conversational. It was usually Fred Rogers, in his house, talking directly to the camera. Let’s talk about what you have going on. Let’s talk about the issues facing your life. Sesame Street was designed to be popular and designed to speak to as many kids as possible. There were always like 30 different things happening on screen during any segment of Sesame Street. Lots of characters doing lots of things, working on several different levels that both young and old could enjoy. Mr. Rogers was designed to speak to you. When Mr. Rogers spoke, it felt like he was speaking directly to an audience of one. That’s an incredibly difficult feat to pull off over the medium of television.
I didn’t really give much thought into the differences between these shows until I was older. As a child, I genuinely really liked both shows. The same imagination that made me wonder what it was like in Oscar the Grouch’s trashcan home also wondered what it looked like in King Friday’s castle. Both shows felt like magic, to me.
At some point during the pandemic, I decided to watch the Tom Hanks starring, Marielle Heller directed A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a film adaptation of Tom Junod’s Esquire piece on Fred Rogers called “Can You Say … Hero?” I really liked the movie but I’m not sure I’d consider it a classic or even one that I’ll likely come back to all that often. I’ve unfortunately never read the Esquire piece that inspired the movie, though I’ve read the movie captured the spirit of the article and was a faithful and creative adaptation of the source material.
It’s an interesting movie, though. I’m a huge Mr. Rogers fan and am a pretty big fan of both Tom Hanks as a person and of Tom Hanks’s movies. Even though he personally did a really great job as Mr. Rogers, Hanks is Hanks and Rogers is Rogers. At the end of the day, even though it was a fully human performance, it felt uncanny valley adjacent. “Those are Fred’s words, but that’s Woody the Cowboy’s voice!” It wasn’t enough to sink the movie, obviously, but it was hard to get beyond that and fully melt into the movie in the way that I was hoping for.
But I did have an interesting realization during the movie that made me appreciate Mr. Rogers more than I had when I first started the movie. There’s a moment in the movie when the main protagonist Tom (who wrote the Esquire profile) shows up to Fred Rogers’ Pittsburgh based television studio and witnesses Fred speaking to a disabled child in a wheelchair. The television crew is all set and is ready to start filming, but they’re delayed while Fred spends time talking one-on-one with the child and his family. Tom is from New York and is from a dysfunctional family. He’s there to write on Mr. Rogers and he’s there to give his full attention to the profile he’s working on, but you can tell his thoughts are elsewhere. Watching him watch Fred Rogers give all his attention to this child while his film crew patiently and attentively gave Fred his space (something you can tell they had grown accustomed to doing), it dawned on me that A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood was a horror movie. Or maybe not a “horror movie,” per se, but that it was following the same patterns and tropes as a classic horror movie. Or more specifically, not just any classic horror movie but was in fact a retelling and inversion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. One of the plot points of that book involves a young solicitor named Jonathan Harker who travels to Count Dracula’s castle to assist Count Dracula in purchasing an apartment near London. While there, he kind of becomes ensnared by the Count (and his harem) and barely ends up escaping with his life.
Ladies and Gentlemen, dear readers, yes, I’m telling you that Fred Rogers was a vampire. I don’t literally mean this, but I also kind of literally mean this. His television studio was his castle. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania might as well be the Transylvania of the United States. Both Count Dracula and Fred Rogers had distinct ways of talking that were unique to both. Okay maybe not. But Fred Rogers is a vampire. Only instead of taking your life, he injects life into yours. Or, maybe more accurately, he helped people feel more full of the life they were already living. He was helping Tom see beauty where maybe he had been putting up emotional roadblocks before. He was helping Tom navigate these hard feelings he’d been having and showing him a new way through. I’ve read he did this for nearly everyone he ever spoke with.
Watching this movie and seeing how much Fred Rogers changed Tom Junod’s life and how he helped him become both a better father and mend his fractured relationship with his father, it dawned on me that Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood might actually work better for adults than it ever did for kids. (AT LAST, WE COME TO THE THESIS!)
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is supposed to set you on the path, but if you want to fully appreciate the man and his mission, you should periodically go down a Fred Rogers rabbit hole and view some of his clips as an adult. And I don’t mean just YouTube clips of his show, but interviews he gave to Charlie Rose (yeah, yeah I know), videos of his commencement addresses to Dartmouth (his alma mater) and Marquette University, or clips of the speech he gave when he received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1997 Daytime Emmy Awards (among countless other clips). And the great thing about doing so is how it works on two different levels; they provide great moral lessons about how to best live life but they’re also meditative and calming on their own. Have you ever smelled a Crayola Crayon? It instantly transports you back to childhood. Watching some of these clips has the same meditative effect.
I had that same thought as I read Maxwell King’s The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers. That book details the countless subtle things Fred Rogers put in his show as a means of teaching the viewer. For example, the stoplight in the show was always on “yellow” as a subtle reminder to the viewer to slow down a little. Not everything needs to be in a hurry. Or there were stories about how Mr. Rogers would sometimes mess up on camera and how they’d leave these gaffes in the show as a reminder to kids that mistakes happen and that it’s okay that they happened and that they can be worked through. Then there’s the famous story where Fred Rogers, a white male, and Officer Clemons, an African American male, soaked their feet together in a children’s pool during a time when many segregated pools still existed across the country.
I’ve long held to the belief that subtle things like these examples above (there are countless more from this show) exist more for the adults watching the show than the kids watching with them. Having that realization was one of the happier thoughts I’ve had in recent memory. After all these years and decades after his death, Mr. Rogers still has things to teach me as an adult.
Like I said above, I finished The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers on September 10th, 2025. On that same day, a young assassin murdered a young Charlie Kirk at a political rally in Utah, while just a few hundred miles away, a child shot up a school with other children in it before turning the gun on himself. A day later we would commemorate the 24th anniversary of the September 11th attacks in New York, Washington DC, and in Rogers’ home state of Pennsylvania. Not long after those attacks in 2001, Fred Rogers came out of retirement to record a series of short video messages aimed at both kids and adults.
In one of those messages, he repeated his famous “look for the helpers” message. “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
I’ve always loved the subtlety of that message. Like I mentioned above; I’m a (some would say overly) sensitive person. I used to think I felt big feelings, but I think a more accurate read would be that I feel all the feelings all of the time. And because of this, I’ve been having a hard time as of late existing in a world that feels like it’s getting progressively (regressively?) meaner and colder. In classic superhero storytelling, a hero’s strength is often their weakness. In my case, I think it’s my too finely tuned sense of empathy. When you’re someone who is hardwired to feel for others, even at times when it’s not called for and/or against your better judgement, it’s hard to regulate it all. Is there a switch I can throw? Is there a button I can press that would prevent me from reading the news about some awful thing happening in some far-off place and not feel bad all day about that thing? If there were a magic button, I would have pressed it long ago, especially with the steady stream of bad news we’re given daily. Sometimes I feel like my central nervous system is either on the verge of System Error or is already there.
I’m not under some naïve illusion that having more episodes of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in the world would somehow stop violence in the world. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood didn’t stop the rise of authoritarianism in our country. The kids who shot up Columbine High School likely grew up on Sesame Street or Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, just like I did. One of the problems with people such as myself who feel all the big feelings all of the time is that I sometimes feel like I’m in a suspended state of emotional growth. I sometimes feel like I have a child’s heart in a grown person’s body with a grown person’s brain. I’m constantly envious and jealous of people who go through life without (seemingly) a care in the world. Because for me, no red trolleys are coming to whisk us away from the danger we’re all constantly bombarded with.
But I think the key to navigating that space lies in what I was saying above about the difference between Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and in Fred Rogers asking us to be the helpers. I don’t know if I fully buy the case I made above that Sesame Street is designed to appeal to the broadest audience possible whereas Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is designed to appeal to an audience of one, but maybe there’s something to it. Maybe that’s what I need to do. I need to make my world smaller. I’m not helping the world by feeling all of the world’s feelings for them, but I can localize it a bit and be a helper to those in own neighborhood.
I’ve long held the belief that exalted people in history should be viewed as comprehensively and as fully human as possible. I want to know their strengths and their flaws. It doesn’t do anyone any good to view Fred Rogers as a saint because it makes their example a standard that we’ll never, ever meet. In other words, Fred Rogers is an example and a template, but I should go easy on myself when I fall short because he certainly fell short, too.
So, for me, I need to make my world smaller and make it a point to be as radically present with people as I can, just like he did. In today’s social media and smart phone world, I think people notice it when you make the effort. What that looks like for me is putting the phone in the pocket, making a decent attempt at eye contact, and leaning in as much as I can. Engage. If you’re with a friend and they’re telling you something, actively listen instead of waiting for your turn to talk. If you’re buying coffee or buying groceries, ask the cashier how they’re doing before they even have the chance to ask you the same. I’ve often felt that the follow-up question is the deal maker, though. After the pleasantries, “are you having a good day today?” I’m always amazed at how often, just asking those secondary questions can melt the tension from the face of the person you’re talking to. It’s like it breaks a spell. Isn’t that what being a good neighbor is all about?
But to address and answer my primary question above; what do I do with the mad and confusing feelings that I feel? I choose to not hide from them (and the information I’m seeing) but to seek solace in as much community as I can. To remind myself that the commuters on the road next to me aren’t just my obstacles to getting to work on time, they’re my neighbors. And should I find myself in an instance where I’m talking to someone I don’t agree with, to fully listen to them and hope that they fully listen to me in return. And as anyone who reads any of my posts might attest to, it’s important to love the person who has done something mean to me, especially if that person is me. That may be the hardest one. But it’s probably the most important one to rally behind. And as an ordained Presbyterian minister, I wonder where Fred Rogers got that from. Hmmm… it’s a mystery.
But all of these thoughts and feelings I have? They aren’t bad. They can sometimes not be the most fun feelings to have but they are my feelings. And I don’t hate that I have them. I love that I have them. But when I’m feeling overwhelmed by them and not feeling like creating something, that’s when I should try and lean into that a bit. I should give creativity a shot and see what happens. When my “fight or flight” response gets triggered, try “fighting” by way of creation. I ended September 10th, 2025 with a paragraph on what I had just witnessed. A month and 4,000 words later, I hope I’ve done that.
Because at the end of the day, it’s sometimes hard to parse out who is making the case for gentleness. It’s sometimes hard to see who is making the case for being radically present with people? Who is telling people to create their art for the sake of creating it? Who is telling people that their feelings – ALL of their feelings – are valid feelings to possess and how to best exist so we only act in healthy ways on those feelings? If not us, then who? Make the time. Make the effort. Be the helper. Be the neighbor. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a red trolley to catch.
An open and shut book 
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