A Nice Epidemic

I get irritated at my husband when he flips channels during commercials.  With increasingly more annoying and insipid television programs (Snookie?  I rest my case), commercials are becoming the shining lights of television creativity.  I live for the E*TRADE ad featuring the precocious-yet-diapered toddler who treated his dog in a manner that is “frowned upon in this establishment.”  I am mesmerized by the self-indulgent yet gorgeous odyssey of luxury Cartier items evoking the Romanoffs and Mughal emperors.  The act of rolling down a window tempts me to ride through the neighborhood, face thrust outward, exclaiming “Wheeeeeee!”  I can no longer invoke the keyless features of my new car without envisioning a diminutive Darth Vader bringing a Volkswagen to life.

The commercial that touches me the deepest is a rather unremarkable series for Liberty Mutual.  In these commercials, strangers commit small acts of kindness to random others.  A child drops a toy and someone picks it up.  The person who witnesses this act is then inspired to move a man’s coffee cup from the edge of a table before it falls.  Stirred by this, a man stops his car to urge a woman across the street.  This leads a woman to push a man out of the way before a stack of boxes falls over on him.  The message is obvious, but the commercial is an abject failure as a marketing tool; I could not recall the company who was using this as a metaphor for their service and was forced to look up.  The unintended consequence, however, is that I began to notice how little people look out for each other.  Everywhere you go, people are tuned in to their smartphones, texting their way down the street, engaged in personal business in a manner that insulates them from the world—and the people—around them.  Social networking has replaced social interaction.  I am as guilty as the rest.  We are more attentive to photos posted by our high school friends than the elderly woman crossing the street in front of us.

Just for fun, I decided to see what would happen if I made a point of committing random acts of kindness.  For a full month, I treated the yellow light as if it meant slow down instead of speed up.  I yielded to others who reached the same checkout line at the same time.  I started saying ‘hello’ to the woman in the toll booth, or ‘how are you’ to the man at the post office.  I gestured to pedestrians, making it clear that I was stopping and that it was safe to proceed.  I asked the bank teller if she was having a good day so far.  I thanked the American Express phone attendant for her help.  I asked the town plumbing inspector if he was enjoying the lovely weather.   I held a grocery basket on a sloping parking lot so a woman could put her bags in her car.  I apologized to the woman at Costco for losing my card before asking for a new one.

In the greater scheme of things, none of these acts will end world hunger or cure cancer or bring home our troops.  But in each case, someone who was busily moving through their automatic, insulated life at the speed of business was visibly taken aback.  The jolt was small, but perceptible.  There is nothing quite so disarming than a person who insists on being nice when you are having a tough day.  I could see these people exhale, release tension from their shoulders, relax the frown muscles around their eyes, and in a few cases, stop to make actual eye contact with  me. 

The most remarkable part of this is that it made me feel better as well.  Suddenly my life was filled with personal contacts and friendly gestures in return.  I caught myself smiling one day while walking through the mall.  I stood a little taller.  My chronically painful knees did not hurt as much.  My blood pressure went down a little.  It makes good medicine.

This is an election year—a time when we once again consider who we would like to lead us.  I do not express personal political points of view, or evaluate those expressed by others.  One thing that I am beginning to consider, however, is the way candidates conduct themselves in public and with their families.  In this militarily-stretched, iphone-distracted, corruption-scarred, blitzed out world, I am getting tired of feeling weighed down by conflict and dishonesty.  Integrity is everything.  It is rare today to see people stepping up.  I hope we have not reached a point where acting with respect toward one another is beyond our capacity as human beings.  As it turns out, being nice—even as a proactive gesture—expends less personal capital than maintaining our defensive shields. 

To quote my husband, my little experiment lacks rigor and sufficient sample size to declare my findings statistically significant.  Suppose we solve that obstacle as well.  If each of us spent the next month committing small and random acts of kindness, what would we have? 

A good start.


Tomorrow's Blog:  The Pianist