On Kindness

The Mom of No has been busy these past few weeks- I've been going on road trips through fly-over states delivering the College Student back to her university (once the luggage was dropped on the dorm room floor, I was bid farewell; sniff sob sniff.  Don't feel too badly for me; I did what every dismissed parent of a college sophomore does on move-in day: I found a park and went birding), working, reading books, hanging out on the nature trail, and getting the Son of Never Stops Eating acclimated to a new campus for his junior year.  I've also been doing some deep thinking- road trips tend to do that to me. Something about watching those mile markers go by on the interstate brings out the philosopher in me.

I should probably warn you up front that any time I do deep road trip thinking I tend to get myself into trouble, at least with people who don't know me well, and sometimes with people who do, and sometimes I make comments about politics or uncomfortable social issues, and if that's just not your thing at the moment then go no further.  Ok, that's the disclaimer. Onward.

Our local school district is in the midst of something they're calling a Kindness Initiative. Now, I don't want anyone to interpret anything I say as meaning that people should just be jerks to each other, because I definitely don't think that. However, we're in year 2 of the Kindness Initiative, and as far as I can tell, The Son of Never Stops Eating has made exactly zero actual friends (and by friends I mean kids he hangs out with outside of school) from the general ed student population, so the Special Needs Mom in me doesn't have 100% buy-in on the Kindness initiative. I'm about to reach the big 5-0 and suffering from a heavy dose of cynicism mixed in with hot flashes and panic about my golden years caused by a sudden increase in e-mails asking me if I've thought about saving for retirement, so take that into consideration when you judge me for that last statement.

I don't want to criticize an entity for trying to be kinder. That's almost like judging baby animals for not being cute enough.  But "kindness" seems to be the cool word of the year.  When I hear it, I wonder if kindness initiatives will lead to authentic inclusion, or if it will just lead to people being nice to my son because they feel like they're required to do it, or because it makes them feel better about themselves, or so they can include their kindness activities on a scholarship essay.  When I think like this, my first instinct is to feel like I'm being ungrateful.  A little kindness is better than no kindness.  Then I wonder how those of us raising special needs kids got so conditioned to accept so little; the message is that we should be happy about the lonely boy who had the celebrity sit and have lunch with him, or the special-needs girl who made the cheerleading squad, and not ask why these kinds of events are still big news.

I've been thinking of kindness as a spectrum: momentary kindness, which is when you buy someone a latte or help them carry their groceries to their car and then you never see them again (extra points if you post about it on Facebook later), or hypocritical kindness, which is when someone posts a meme on Facebook about how we just need to be kind to each other and then their next post is a statement about how if illegal immigrant teenaged girls don't want to go without menstrual supplies they shouldn't come here in the first place, so the idea of kindness is really more like "we should be kind to people who have the same color skin and go to the same churches and live in the same neighborhoods and who don't stir the pot with that LGBTQ nonsense and everyone else can go stick it".

I suspect that at least some calls for kindness are essentially a way of saying "the world is just f****d up beyond all belief and I want to do or say something but I don't know what I can say that won't piss someone off on my friends list or one of my relatives but how can you argue with kindness?".  As a former adolescent, my own life would probably have been considerably easier if certain of my peers had been less unkind, so once again- I'm not advocating being mean, or cruel, or even just not doing anything. I'm not anti-kindness. However, human beings seem to want simple solutions to complex problem- and kindness isn't going to solve very many of the problems we're facing unless we are ready to go for sacrificial kindness- in which we are willing to give up something a lot more than a few moments of time, a few dollars, or a smile.  Kindness is a way of being, but it isn't exclusive (kids can be smart and good athletes and kind, you don't have to pick one) and it isn't a solution to most of our deep-rooted problems.

Perhaps I would feel better about kindness as a popular concept if it generated the sort of thinking that led to real change- for example, is a health care system that requires sick people to ask for funding by crowdsourcing really kind? Is a society kind when its children go to schools with inadequate funding and leaky ceilings and poor ventilation?  Is it kind to present choices as "either/or" when if we wanted to, we have the resources to do both? We want each other to be kind, but it doesn't seem to be a criterion we use as a basis for deciding who to cast ballots for.

Because I am not a complete cynic (yet), I also believe in genuine kindness- people for whom this characteristic is so innate, everything they do seems to have kindness and love for other people and their communities embedded in it. I am not this person, but I know people who are, and I admire them for it.  I suppose we can all strive to be a little kinder, and make the world a little bit better (I like to think that every piece of trash I pick up on the trail is generating positive vibes in the world); kindness is not a solution in itself to all our problems, but it is a small part of getting to those solutions.