We’re pulling apart from each other, and kindness is dying — but maybe it can be saved
The universe is expanding. Every second of the day, the Milky Way stretches farther and farther apart, the room between stars and black holes swelling, our galaxy moving away from its neighbors, who are in turn moving away from each other. Space is spreading, like “dough rising in the oven,” according to NASA.
On Earth, too, the distances between things seem to be growing.
Our elderly parents and grandparents sit in their houses, in nursing homes, isolated, farther away than ever from those who love them, interacting through screens with their children and grandchildren and friends.
Our kids learn in virtual classrooms, miles away from their classmates and teachers. Even when they’re in the same building as each other, they’re six feet apart and wearing masks, masks that hide their smiles and frowns and grimaces and grins.
Politics also divides us with ruthless efficiency, even more effectively than COVID-19, pulling us away from our neighbors, our families, causing us to accuse each other of all manner of vile acts. Some spread profane lies about blood-drinking child torturers, a slander spread by QAnon, and folks believe the lies not because the evidence for them is good but because our expectations of one another are so abysmally low.
Even managing the coronavirus crisis has become a partisan mess, where human beings are weighed against political points. Blue states and red states compare COVID casualties like box scores. Hundreds of thousands of lives are dismissed with a flick of the wrist, a “virtually nobody,” a snide nickname “the election infection.”
On Twitter, President Donald Trump’s social media chief posts a video supposedly of a man being shocked after trying to remove a Trump sign that had been electrified. More than 68,000 people, Ivanka Trump among them, liked the tweet. A good chuckle those folks got, at someone’s pain.
We yell at each other for wearing masks, for not wearing masks, for enforcing rules about masks, for not enforcing the rules.
It’s wearying, all of this hatred, and I wonder where our kindness went, when we became so unbelievably mean to each other.
Maybe we can blame some of the decrease in human kindness on instability and fear, the kind gripping us now as we trudge into fall and winter with no vaccine, no promise of an orderly transfer of power at the highest reaches of government, no hope for restaurant owners and bartenders and hair stylists who’ve lost their jobs and businesses and health care.
During an earlier pandemic, the Black Death, as the plague was on its way to felling a third of the
population of Europe, cruelty also went hand-in-hand with illness and death. Families stopped attending to their sick. Christians massacred Jews, thinking they’d caused the plague. Pope Clement VI forgave plague victims’ sins because not enough priests could or would administer last rites.
But still, there seems something especially shallow, especially cold about our time.
The Dow Jones, we’re told, is doing great, almost back to preCOVID levels, as if the stock market were some sort of living thing,
a precious creature whose health we should celebrate. Does that number tell us how many are suffering, scared, lonely? Our investments, though, are probably fine.
You watch protesters be pushed to the ground, children maced, police officers shot, Bibles be used as props, and you wonder: How much more of this can our society take? How much further apart can we get before the whole thing is ripped to shreds, torn beyond repair?
I am not a psychologist or preacher or or relationship expert, but here’s how I plan to fight it, our global movement into entropy and chaos: I refuse to be parted from my empathy.
I’ll remind myself that politicians may profit when discord grows, but I do not.
I’ll remind myself that the stories you hear from talking heads on Fox News and MSNBC are intended to inflame, not soothe.
I’ll remind myself that Twitter and Facebook and Instagram are, at best, harmless stories about our ideal lives and, at worst, dangerous deceptions.
The 2020 election will, blessedly, one day end. But our neighbors, family, and countrymen and countrywomen will still be here. I want to live in a place, a spiritual and mental place, where I still feel kindness toward all, no matter what someone believes and whether or how they voted.
So, even though we may be moving apart, spreading infinitesimally farther away from each other with every millisecond we’re alive, we don’t have to focus on the distance.
We can, instead, keep our eyes upward, and on each other, and remember that no matter how far apart we get, we will always live in the same space, underneath the same sun, looking out at the same stars.