Entry tags:

deep thoughts, friends, the net

What Do You Have To Say? - Not Enough Coverage

(Responding to my friend Kelly, who wrote: I firmly believe that kindness is the most crucial thing that isn't getting enough coverage or appreciation in this world. People see news about corporate evil, violent crimes, bizarre conspiracies, etc., etc., but we seldom hear about people who are actually carrying out the golden rule in their daily lives.)

I wish to gently disagree with you. It occurs to me that kindness, or by extension virtue, will always tend to appear unremarkable, whether the medium is journalism or art. To the degree a society does sustain itself we can expect its members to approve of most of its events. Somebody somewhere is refilling a supermarket cooler with milk jugs, carefully and promptly. A child completes her math homework, though the last two problems troubled her. A librarian has patiently directed a stranger again to the correct stacks for the books they need. Good things must happen all the time, or else society collapses.

I think you've expressed in a general way the urgency we must feel after any exceptionally good event. Appreciation certainly has its place in our societies. This is an ordinary, common-place observation, because daily we hope for appreciation by others and we desire to share our admirations. Since good events happen all the time, the acts of kindness we notice must represent exceptional ones. A friend is there to talk every time you need to talk, or has a good excuse otherwise. A friend gives you lunch on a traumatic day. A friend entertains you with a classic movie and popcorn when you're down and out and have few options to do anything. It would feel wrong not to acknowledge such things when they happen to us.

You're free to argue that we could acknowledge kindness to a greater degree, but the project of communicating the wonderful things we do for each other already flounders on supernumeracy. In other words, we can easily find faults in our social system, but selecting its best features leads us to greater disagreement.

So it seems unremarkable to me that bad news predominates our widest forms of communication (911 and the Emergency Broadcast System come to mind), just as good news does in our most intimate encounters. So rather than kindness missing coverage, I imagine it's humanity. I want to describe it as our universal mystery of being, or our collective consternation. We have a bad tendency to shorten the mess up by limiting who we consider human, or else limiting what human is. And we don't share enough examples of different people being human, which I think you'd agree would include many instances of other humans being kind.