What's Next? 37

I cannot think of any time than now for the importance of kindness.   Many of us re frightened and anxious and our future looms dark and uncertain.  This can be difficult.  Worse than difficult.  When we are under stress, our patience can get short, and our tempers rather high.  This is the time to really guard ourselves.  While it is important that we take care of ourselves, if we are driven more by fear, and less motivated by our concern for the common good, then we really run the risk of taking on an everyone for themselves kind of mentality, and everyone else becomes regarded as a potential threat.

For me this occurred today on the bus.  This woman was standing very near to where I was sitting (during the pandemic, bus passengers are expected to sit down, and she wasn't wearing a mask (I was), placing me at risk of whatever she was exhaling from her mouth.  As I was getting ready to get off the bus, I asked her for two metres of space, please.  She ignored me, and as I was getting off the bus I turned around and told her "pandemic, eh?  She went on ignoring me.

People like that can be very hard to tolerate.  I perhaps could have been nicer, but I sense that she really needed her butt kicked.  Sometimes we are not being kind by merely being nice.  But I still draw the line at intentional rudeness.  I also have no idea what kind of pain she might be living with.  Or, she could just be a particularly self-centred individual who really doesn't care a shit about others.  Unfortunately people like that do exist, and there are quite a few.  This could be partly thanks to the huge culture of selfishness, greed and narcissism we have been living in these past fifty years or so.

I think that most of us do want to be kind, but this can also take a lot of work, and many of us are either too lazy or simply too tired and drained to take on very much.  We still have quite a fight ahead of us, including this monumental struggle for fighting through all the fog and sargasso that has been blinding and strangling us over these past five decades.

We also have to come to turns with our innate tendencies towards violence.  Lately, a lot of thinking folk have been trying to persuade us that human beings are really naturally kind and good.  I think they are partly right.  We are also naturally violent, treacherous, selfish and vicious and destructive.  We are complex beings.  I'm not going to go into the nature versus nurture argument here.  It is possibly both and, possibly neither, or maybe it's both and, and neither.  I don't know, and I don't think anyone has figured it out yet.

Regardless of our most natural, most primal tendencies, we have to work more on harnessing the good and the kind in our natures.  More than ever.  Our species' survival is going to depend on this.

All for now, duckies.