Gentle Reader, I am going into exhausting and boring detail about how we value one another for one simple reason. We want to live in a better world. Right? Rapacious global capitalism hasn't delivered. Right? Apart from lifting a lot of people out of poverty in developing countries, I mean. But more people becoming richer (and for that matter, more of us also becoming poorer, at least in the so-called developed countries) has not made any of us any kinder, or more compassionate. It seems to have made a lot of us more selfish and nastier. And this lack of love certainly spreads into our way of treating one another and our attitudes towards our Mother Earth, who is languishing over our death march towards irreversible climate change.
Lately, I am hearing more the word kindness. The importance of kindness. This is not simply being nice. It is very possible, and often highly necessary that we be nice without being kind. Kindness has to come from the heart, or it is simply niceness, and nothing more. Ah, we are such hypocrites! We are also living under conditions of a humanitarian catastrophe, here in our own lovely growing and thriving cities in our own lovely and developed and rich Canada. That humanitarian catastrophe is called homelessness.
I don't think that very many of us really have much capacity for the kindness that it is going to take for real social change to occur. Even today, on the radio, I heard that a popular morning show host found his Twitter inbox full of racist anti-Chinese rants about the Corona virus. We like to believe that those are small, tiny minority. I would love to believe that those wastes of DNA are a small, tiny minority. But are they? We have no way of knowing.
My own response to this nonsense of panic and scare? I passed through Chinatown on Friday, the eve of Chinese New Year, bought two lovely botsi, or sesame balls at the Newtown bakery on E. Pender Street, and enjoyed them for a late lunch when I got home. Buying them from a Chinese lady (we exchanged new Year greetings) does nothing to put me at risk, and I hope that she doesn't catch anything from me either, except maybe good and friendly vibes. And I hope to return there this week, tomorrow maybe, for more sesame balls, and maybe a coconut bun too.
In the eighties, when AIDS was a death sentence, I intentionally went right into the gay community and offered pastoral care and support to people living with AIDS and HIV. A huge learning curve. I made and lost many wonderful friends, as they were all soon dead, usually within a couple of years. We shared food from the same plate. We embraced one another as brothers. They were more susceptible to anything they might catch from me because of their compromised immune systems. I didn't catch anything from anyone, by the way, and that was almost forty years ago.
Kindness does not come by the tap of the magic wand of the virtue Fairy. It is a skill that we have to willingly learn, work, at and develop. It also means carefully examining and scrutinizing ourselves and our own motives, as well as actually putting ourselves out there among others. Easy? No. Possible? Yes. Necessary? Highly necessary, because our future survival and the survival of the biosphere that sustains us, is going to largely depend on our being kind to one another. Not simply nice. Kind.
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