Spoiler Notice: If you haven’t read book seven, and you want it to be a surprise, read no further.

      Human Kindness is in part about making the best of life in spite of the conditions.  If we walk around lamenting sad historical events and blame them for our sorry lot in life, this poor life strategy prevents us from living out our lives to their fullest potential.  When bad things happen to us and we wallow in them, only then do the bad things win for they have destroyed us.  Somehow we need to find a way to triumph over bad things and Harry Potter is one lad who does just that.  It is only when we succumb to bad circumstances that we lose something very precious: ourselves.

      The seven-book Harry Potter series elevated author J.K. Rowling to a financial status above the Queen of England to $600 million net worth.  The question of how Harry enticed us to buy books, attend movies, play board and video games and buy a host of paraphernalia is complicated but there is a fundamental human kindness element in his story we need to examine.

      Why do we like Harry so much?  He’s real.  He’s not perfect as he’s the kind of boy who becomes angry, breaks wizarding rules and ‘blows up his aunt.’  He’s a hero and he’s affable.  Our hearts reach out to an orphan raised by perhaps two of the meanest people in the world in the Dursleys.  He’s someone we can root for … but Harry could have turned out very differently.

      Harry was the ‘boy who lived’ and since he defeated ‘you-know-who’ as a baby he could have achieved celebrity status in a blink.  Harry could have been more like Draco Malfoy than Draco: Haughty, perfect, stuck-up, privileged, biased against muggle-borns wizards and witches (mudbloods) and readily tempted by evil.  But where does the element of Human Kindness enter in while we examine ‘Potter?’  For more, go here.
Rare people somehow survive terrible upbringings.  Near the end of book seven we learn that Severus Snape was an unlikeable child who grew up in a home where mom and dad often fought.  He grew up quiet, sad, mean spirited, disillusioned and geeky.  Yet Harry somehow triumphs as a person in spite of how the Dursley’s keep him in a room ‘under-the-stairs.’  He may be a little shy or backwards at times, but he works through most of that!  Miraculously Harry stays real and grounded while being raised in the muggle world whereas had he been raised by wizards and witches he would have grown up living under a microscope with people falling over him in a way that would have made him think he was someone special (something ‘Snape’ always unjustly accused him of being).  Had Harry been raised differently the story would have risked creating someone we would not have cared to read about for seven books.  Harry had to be who he was and that meant being raised by the Dursleys, sad though that may be.

      Harry grew up never wanting to BE special.  All he wanted was to have a home, a mom and a dad and to cozy up with them while a fire blazed in the hearth.  Often others wished they could be Harry for his fame or his fortune but he leveled them when he reminded them of his personal cost which afforded him those things.  His fame and fortune was the result of the absence of the people and things he longed for – fame and fortune clearly wasn’t everything!  While he was forever denied the things he longed for, neither did he grow up bitter and resentful because he didn’t get what he wanted either.  In fact, Harry was made that much more adorable to readers because he envied Ron’s large, unruly, somewhat poor family because they had a ‘home’ instead of a house, a family, instead of mean guardians and love instead of … well in the case of the Dursley’s … nothing!

      Harry is the positive product of being raised in a bad home environment and surviving in spite of how he was raised.  He was just an unlucky kid given to mean step-parents but he was fortunate to have the characteristics to be someone Norman Vincent Peale would approve of.  In Peale’s book The Power of Positive Thinking he suggests that when bad things happen to us, it’s like being given lemons.  Life can hand us a lemon, it’s what we do with it and how we react to it that counts in Peale’s mind.  Harry Potter is handed lemons – the assassination of his parents, the scar on his forehead and being given to the Dursleys to be raised – and he makes lemonade.  He overcomes meanness with likeability, distrust with loyalty, hatred with love.

      In the end we like Harry for who he is because of how he was raised.  In a twisted way we’re grateful he was treated badly as a child because he became the boy who would grow up to defeat ‘you-know-who’ a second time.  What’s vital for us to understand is that Harry never had to like how he was raised or how he was treated.  But everything that happened to him was a compilation of events that created characteristics and traits that made him a great person … humble, loving, daring, honest (with his friends), loyal to his friends and Dumbledore and at the very end, even having the ability to forgive Severus Snape after six years of meanness.

      Everything Harry had at the end of book seven was due to the meanness of the Dursleys.  Their hurtful betrayal of a guardian’s trust towards an orphaned boy somehow built a winner of a person.  Harry knows there is no sense in holding in long-held animosity or righteous indignation against them.  There is nothing to be gained by it.  In a bizarre way he knows they helped make him the exact right person he needed to be to succeed in his quest.  He doesn’t have to like or love the Dursleys, but he has to forgive and accept what they did.  And at the end of book seven, when life is all that he could have hoped for (still without his parents, of course) Harry must look back at those first 11 years and the seven summers thereafter with sadness perhaps, but with a sense of gratefulness as well.

      When we can come to love ourselves for who we are and understand that who we are is a result of everything that ever happened to us, we must always include the bad times and the roles those bad things played in forming us.  We don’t have to like them but we do have to appreciate them for they helped shape us.  For Harry to wish he had never known the Dursleys means he would have had a completely different life … and that wish changes the world.  Would …

      --  ‘he-who-must-not-be-named’ have been destroyed again:
      --  Hogwarts have been saved
      --  Severus’ sad life been viewed as a huge triumph
      --  Harry’s marriage to Ginny ever happened
      --  His three children been born?  
      --  Change him just a bit, and these positive endings seem unlikely.

      Now I don’t mean to say that how Harry was raised was not sad and unjust.  It was.  I think I’d still like to punch Mr. Dursley right in the kisser for what he did to Harry.  And we ever met Harry he would tell you he would never wish his own childhood on another soul – being raised by the Dursley’s isn’t a path anyone would ever choose.  But that path was thrust upon him and somehow, he did make a very nice tasting batch of lemonade with those two very tart lemons didn’t he?  Human kindness is about accepting yourself where you are and loving yourself there and once you do that, the past, though painful can no longer harm or control you.  You, like Harry can triumph as a person, accept unfortunate acts in your past without rancor and therefore for this reason others can come to like you as much as we like Harry Potter.