There has been a sentiment running through the blood of America that being kind is not a necessity. That love should be an afterthought. That hate and crime and violence and terror are inevitable. That we can do nothing to stop crimes of hate and loathing.
That these things will creep up on us as brash as the man who aggressively shoved by you on the street, and did not apologize. America has romanticized income and popularity, and it has sickened the American mind. We don’t listen anymore. We aren’t kind anymore. It is easy to complain about the person walking slowly in front of you or raise your voice at someone who doesn’t understand the question or look at someone with disgust who doesn’t look like you. It’s easy to cut someone off on the freeway and not look the cashier in the eye and say thank you. It’s easy to not give people the time of day. It is easy to give negativity to the world, and it is easy to expect it back. It has become difficult to be kind. We expect that strangers do not want to talk, that people don’t need help, that we should care about ourselves and nobody else. We are a selfish nation. A selfish people. We have all gone through something that had the capability to make even the most familiar places feel like jail. Behind bars and ultimately helpless, begging for an answer. It is impossible to erase someone's problems completely or fix all of the nightmares that riddle our minds. But have faith in kindness and love and you can change the world. Be the answer.
There are 7.125 billion of us on this earth. We all have wounds. Scars invisibly etched onto our skin, that only we can see. Some heal and fade over time, becoming a distant shiver of a memory. Some wounds never heal. Their victims succumb to them quietly, or with screams so loud you finally hear. Don’t let those screams be the thing to wake you up to the reality of this terrifying world. Every person walking down the road, past you on their way to work. Or in the cubicle across the way, or in the apartment building next door. Every Chipotle customer and Beyonce fan and sixteen year old boy and billionaire has had something haunting their mind. There is a girl, somewhere, in every high school around the country, begging you with tired eyes to ask her to sit down at your lunch table. Ask her to sit down. There is a boy living down the hall in your college dorm, who needs you to say hello to him when you’re on your way to class. Say hello. There is a human being, somewhere, with fingers down her throat, with her head in the toilet, cursing the way society rejects her body. She could be sitting next to you at class. There is a boy staring down at his hands and wondering why he feels so goddamn useless. You brushed by him at a party. There is a person who looks like she is more successful than you’ll ever be, but deep down, she is engulfed by the flames of her own anxiety. There is a person wondering so desperately why he can’t fit in. Why he’s even here anymore. And nobody answers. I am begging you to answer.
Be the answer. We’ve all been at the bottom of the ditch wondering when someone is going to realize the bones in our closets are crowding our bedrooms so much that we cannot see the floor. Be the answer. To the person who cannot see the ground. In a time where violence and oppression and terror hang over our heads in thick black waves we need more than anything to be there for one another. We must hold on to something. And that thing is kindness. The tiny spark of hope that burns through the holes in my sweater, the one concept in this terribly terrifying world that can erupt into something stunning. Opening your eyes every morning and devoting yourself to being kind to others can be ridiculously difficult. Because kindness doesn’t yield a tangible thing. As humans, everything we do is for tangible gain, we feel that we cannot even be kind because we will get nothing in return. People have so much going on in their lives, so much clutter spilling from their closed closets, do not add to the clutter. Prioritize the right things. Prioritize being kind. You don’t have to justify yourself, you don’t have to explain why you dress a certain way, you don’t have to be somebody that you are not, you don’t have to feel inferior, you don’t have to change your beliefs. You just have to survive the days and be kind and you have to smile and give life your absolute all and give to the world what you want to receive back. Start with a smile. Start with hello. It may sound simple but it could change somebody’s life.
I started to notice the possibility of kindness as a catalyst for change in our world when I moved away from the hustle and bustle of a New York City lifestyle to the midwest, where my day never fails to see compliments from strangers, smiles on the street, and pleasant conversation everywhere I go. These gestures, no matter how small they may seem, have the power to shatter the negativity we feel in our bones. Leaving room for kindness to spread through our veins and run through our blood. Begging us to pass it on. The world in which we live steals things from us incessantly. It is not always good to us. It cannot always look like smiles and puppies and golden lottery tickets and dripping ice cream cones. The world takes from us. It takes our parents and our good friends. It takes the people we love. It takes our dignity and our morality. Our virtue, our honesty. It takes and takes and takes. We cannot change our fate in this world. But we are in control of what we give to the world. Give something to yourself. Give something to others. Give kindness. Be the answer.
