Kindness

During all this snow, I was the recipient of three acts of kindness: one neighbor shoveled my car out, another cleaned it off on another occasion, and when I got stuck foolishly trying to go where I shouldn’t, four wonderful teenagers appeared magically in my rearview mirror and pushed and pushed until I was free.

Three of these kids were young women, beautifully aglow with youth and the ruddiness of a cold winter day. I will never forget their faces. To top it off, all breathless and happy, they told me to stay to my left as I entered the main road, the right lane being still snowbound.

These simple acts of neighborly kindness give me such hope in a landscape that is increasingly bereft of common human kindness.

Small wonder. The president of this nation, a country rich in legacies of decencies and kindness, twitters daily venom and pettiness with the cold malignancy of a serpent of hate. I’d venture that if one had the stomach to go through his canon of twitters there would not be one with a shred of human kindness.

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” he once bellowed in his usual state of squint-eyed semi-rage. Roy Cohn was the chief henchman of Joe McCarthy, one of the most evil men in American history. Cohn could give him spades in pure, unadulterated evil. He died a well-earned death of AIDS. Cohn was also Donald Trump’s esteemed mentor.

The Trump White House is a desert of kindness. There is none. His children are likewise kindness challenged. His dolt sons simper and smirk and make regular killing trips to Africa. Ivanka, his soft-eyed doe of a daughter, uses virtual slave labor to produce her line of knockoff women’s apparel. One hopes that she is at least kind to her kids, but I have the feeling that they spend vastly more time with an array of nannies than they do with mommy. I have no real use for Melania, but nonetheless feel that whatever kindness she feels is centered around Barron, as it should be.

There is a shrinking of kindness afoot in the land. Many Americans use the anonymity of what is actually “unsocial” media to give vent to their worst and most hateful feelings, Trump being their new mentor in these internet spewings. People have actually been killed in retaliation for unfriending someone on Facebook. “Friending” is such a wrong term anyhow, more marketing than reality.

Bullying in our schools is epidemic. School systems regularly hold training sessions in combating this scourge of pure unkindness. In a recent Time mag article, a first-year fourth grade teacher saw that kids can be very kind to each other – after they have inflicted pain and misery.

Yet I am not without hope. I see before me now the faces of Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey. There is kindness etched into the lines that make these faces so wonderfully human. And there is a wisdom that makes kindness its foundation. I would love to see 

Oprah make a run at Trump. America would get to see the difference between a full, caring, kind human being – albeit one who has a keen grasp on reality – and a flannel-mouthed charlatan obsessed with his own delusional paranoid sphere of hate and spite. Fuck his so-called “base.” They are just that – base. Oprah could bring America back to itself.

And before me too are the beautiful faces in my rearview mirror.