Eighth grade started on a Thursday. It was my first day at a new school, and my outgoing self was uncharacteristically nervous. My stomach never ceased to ache throughout the day, which felt like it went on forever. Two days later, I went to a bat mitzvah of a girl in my grade whose name I had never heard. I arrived at the service that morning to benches full of my peers, with no room to spare. Saving myself the embarrassment of asking the equivalent of a stranger to move over, I took an empty bench in front of the other students. I sat for a minute or two, feeling sorry for myself, until I saw an entire row of girls stand up and move over to sit next to me. They didn’t say anything to me, before or after their shift, but it resonated with me. While recounting this, I like to ask myself if I would do the same thing. I like to think that I would, but there is really no way to tell.
Often, when I look back on this event, I wonder what drove the girls to do this. One possibility is our urge to avoid the tension of seeing someone in need of support. Another is our innate fear of rejection by our peers, in this case, those who may have been observing. Of course, I am sure that those girls had their own motives. Maybe they were trying to look good in front of others. Maybe they wanted to get to know the new kid. Maybe they were asked to do it. Or maybe, just maybe, they wanted to be included as the prime example of kindness in an essay I wrote over four years later.
The act of kindness I experienced that day wasn’t purely altruistic; it wasn’t kindness put out in the world for the sole purpose of kindness. Many say that nothing is truly altruistic, that everything we do is for some ulterior motive. There is even a memorable episode of Friends where Phoebe and Joey look for a truly selfless good deed and come to the conclusion that no such thing exists. While I do not believe that any kind act can be 100% selfless, it shouldn’t matter anyway. Any act of kindness will release at least a small rush of dopamine, and engaging in semantics such as how good someone feels afterwards just seems to interfere with what is really important. What matters isn’t how good they feel afterwards. It isn’t even how good I felt afterwards. What matters is the net release of kindness into the world, and that should be all that good deeds focus on.
Perhaps what drew my attention to this one brief moment are the experiences that predated it. That moment went against everything that had been shown to me, a middle schooler, in the previous several years. By this point, it had been ingrained in me that the only way to get people to really like you was to be mean to others, and the meaner you were, the cooler you were. Up to this point, middle school had been a gruesome, everlasting journey, and I had been met with unkindness throughout. In sixth grade at my old school, I had written a song for an arts competition, and I made it to the national level. The recording of it went into the local newspaper, and my classmates found it. Once they did, they began to harass me for it, and I expected it. To legitimately enjoy the song or compliment me was to put oneself out there, something a middle schooler would never dream of doing. To ridicule was easy. Writing music was something foreign, so it was automatically branded as uncool. None of this is to say that the song was good—it wasn’t—but the concept of greeting it with open arms seemed unimaginable. With this background, I never would have expected to be treated the way I was three days into my time at a new school. It was a milestone in the maturity of those around me and also myself, and as I’ve matured, I have come to value kindness more and more frequently.
Despite the development of morals I’ve felt around and within me, the presence of unkindness definitely has yet to disappear. While I still feel some unkindness in my environment, I especially worry for those who are younger than me, those being raised in today’s national and international political climate. I’m not an original thinker in stating that the current political situation, especially what I’ve seen in the United States, is particularly polarizing. The terms “identity politics” and “radical extremists” are not new to any American’s ears, which suggests there is a serious problem at hand.
Recently, hatred appears to have surged throughout our country. Whatever that “out-group” is in specific communities, it seems to be commonly met with instant contempt and mistreatment. However, these behaviors by the masses aren’t caused by the decision to be hateful. Supporters and members of political parties demonizing the other side has been a constant ever since we as Americans began our political process. Even in 1796, the first election after George Washington, supporters of John Adams claimed that Thomas Jefferson supporters “were cut-throats who walk in rags and sleep among filth.” Disliking those with different interests is clearly nothing new; now it has been normalized.What made the difference is the recent changes in behavior of our role models, which, in the case of politics, are the candidates themselves. In 1996, when Senator Bob Dole received the Republican nomination, he spoke tactfully about his Democratic opponent, Bill Clinton. “He is my opponent, not my enemy,” Dole noted during his speech. In the 2016 election, on the other hand, Republican nominee Donald Trump called Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton “lyin’,” “crazy,” “crooked,” and “heartless.” He has also taken to assigning nicknames to 2020 Democratic candidates, such as “Sleepy Joe” Biden and “Crazy Bernie” Sanders. This demonization of the opposition by role models has only increased hatred from supporters, and now it seems we are in a political world where people are afraid to exist as they are. The impulses toward unkindness and exclusion that I assumed we grew out of with age have stuck around, and our social development seems to be a waste. The immediate rejection of any existence other than the one we are used to, a concept that plagued our insecure beings as preteens, is only gaining more traction, along with those who promote it.
With the value of kindness diminishing as it is today, its importance only grows. The reason videos of good deeds spread so quickly on the internet is that kindness is a resource lots of us are lacking in our lives. We enjoy consuming content that warms our hearts and “restores our faith” in humanity, as so many put it. However, our reaction to witnessing or hearing about kind acts seems slightly counterintuitive. We see a boy assist an old lady in crossing the street, or a family leave snacks out for their postman, and many of us use it as an excuse—a way for us to say, “Hey, the world’s not that bad, look at this puppy play with this fawn.” We distract ourselves with random acts of kindness when instead, we should be embracing our own capacity for kindness.
As we embark on our journey to a kinder world, we should consider the distinction between kindness and politeness, two words sometimes used interchangeably. In my eyes, politeness is ingrained by practice, nurtured through instruction. It is, in many ways, a behavior conditioned from when we are young. You see a person behind you; you hold the door. Somebody gives you something; you thank them. Politeness is a testament to one’s upbringing more than anything else. This is not to say that teaching politeness is a bad thing—it certainly isn’t. However, kindness seems to be something that cannot simply be taught. To me, kindness is something far more pure. While politeness may draw the borders of a well-rounded life, kindness fills in the middle, highlighting different patterns with each person, thus forming us into the people we are. Kindness is best understood through practice, and through reflecting upon all of our relationships with kindness throughout our lives, we create richer versions of ourselves.