It might be the people along protest march routes handing out bottled water to perfect strangers. It might be the people cheering healthcare workers. Or the guy piping a tune on his bagpipe from his urban rooftop every night at sundown for 100 days. “And nobody complained,” he remarked after calling it quits when he ran out of tunes. Or it could be my long-married gay friends who sponsored a persecuted young man seeking asylum and are caring for him “as the son we never had” in their small apartment while trying to guide him along the complex road to safety in the Land of the Free. But these and a zillion other small instances point to the same large truth:
Kindness is making a comeback. I believe it will become an integral piece of what emerges as our New Normal.
If that happens, it’ll be thanks to a lot of people already hard at work to make it so. Over at randomacts.org they are out to “conquer the world one random act of kindness at a time” — in case you think kindness-building has no lofty goals. The Random Acts people are in the business of fostering “small acts of kindness, (ranging from) inspiring someone to buy a stranger a cup of coffee, to much bigger acts of kindness like building a school in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua.” If you have a really good idea for a randomly kind act, they will even help you out with some funding to make it happen. (Or you can go…
