Going for more than seven days of kindness

We celebrate Thanksgiving this week. November’s main event, with all the trimmings and dressing, has an undercard, too: football, facial hair, and a renewed or reminded sense of the power and goodness of human camaraderie. 

Oh, I almost forgot. November also brings us elections and, in an odd bit of timing, World Kindness Week. For Nebraskans, whose reputational calling card touts all the elements of “nice,” marking kindness just days after what was in a couple high profile cases an acrimonious election campaign, irony colors this November. 

I thought about World Kindness Week while navigating one of Nebraska’s nearly 10,000 miles of highways last week. A gray pickup truck roared up behind me, braked hard and then locked onto my bumper like a “Talladega Nights” stunt driver. Grateful the Chevy emblem didn’t come through my rear windshield, I was nonetheless slightly unnerved. That happens when the face of the driver behind you appears to be in your back seat.

Full disclosure, I enjoy driving fast as much as the next lead- foot. At the moment the gray pickup was trying to crawl inside my trunk, however, I was going the speed limit. The chutzpah, right? Hoping to blunt any escalation, I veered right and let him pass. He rushed by, bearing down on a blue minivan just ahead.

My Ricky-Bobby-trading-paint moment was neither unusual nor seriously unsettling — more road snit than road rage. Having driven Los Angeles freeways for 10 years, I know the difference. Perhaps he was hurrying to a family emergency. Or perhaps he just has bad manners … at 90 mph.

After my adrenaline leveled off, my mind wandered over to World Kindness Week, the election and “Nebraska Nice.” The pickup had Nebraska plates.

We pride ourselves on our affability and hospitality, two attributes surely in the ballpark if you’re trying to define kindness. We like to think of Nebraska as a place where neighbor is a verb, some agreeable action to help someone or just be friendly, as in “We neighbored back and forth with the Smiths when they lived across the way.” Moreover, we’re born with the gene that requires us to wave (a raised index finger acceptable) to every vehicle we meet on a country road. A decade ago, I half-expected the Legislature to codify kindness during the “Nebraska Nice” tourism campaign whose tagline was “Visit Nebraska. Visit Nice.”

Of course, much as license plate designs do, state slogans engender heated debate, some of which wasn’t very nice as Nebraskans considered “Nebraska Nice” and, well, you can see where I’m going with this irony thing.

This November, however, juxtaposing a general election just days before a week devoted to kindness strained the seams of sensibility. Still, rather than assign a negative note to that observation, I’m going with irony.

That’s because an irascible bitterness tinged foregoing months as voters in Nebraska and elsewhere navigated a course of candidates and causes, where kindness had little import. Pollyanna is surely a losing political strategy, and I understand the rough and tumble of electing leaders and passing referendums. I also understand that our political needle has been moving toward rougher campaigns and harder tumbles.

Nor do I expect that when World Kindness Week closely follows a big election, we’ll be struck “nice,” hold hands and, in a chorus of mismatched political interests, belt out rousing rendition of “Kumbaya.” Perhaps post-election silence is the best version of kindness we’re going to get.

Here’s the thing about elections, though: They bifurcate, dividing us into yeses and noes, fors and againsts, winners and losers. The voting booth is the very essence of duality. Kindness, I would argue, requires a more universal application, a recognition of our interconnectedness. Otherwise we choose to be kind to one group over another or one individual instead of another because of who they are, what they believe, whom they love, how or even if they worship and, in Novembers filled with football and thankfulness for our bounty, for whom they vote. That isn’t kindness. That’s judgment. 

Perhaps my perception of irony was askew. Perhaps World Kindness Week following shortly after an election season with months of ad hominem traffic is actually genius, a time where we can recenter our common humanity and then act accordingly … you know, with kindness.

Nah. Probably not happening. Some, perhaps, are even pleased that World Kindness Week is only seven days. 

But, gratefully, others are kind even when life’s challenges and problems indeed require a yes or no, a for or against, a winner or a loser.