Kindness At Rest
Last month my family hosted a family from Odessa fleeing the war in Ukraine. We live close to the U.S. Southern border in California, where a few hundred refugees from Ukraine were waiting in Tijuana after making their initial journey out of Ukraine to Poland, mostly to Germany and then to Mexico. If they had family already living in the U.S. they were granted asylum fairly quickly; within the course of a week. So members of my church circulated an email asking if anyone would be willing to host people in need for a few days and get them to the airport in San Diego where they could embark on their final leg of the journey to wherever in the U.S. their family lived. My wife texted me a screen shot of the email.
“What do u think?”
“Sure”
And when I got home from my son’s baseball practice that afternoon there was a Ukrainian family sleeping in my guest room. I’d already forgotten about the text so I was a little surprised.
It was a young couple and their one year old son. They stayed two days. They mostly slept or sat in our back yard patio in the warm Southern California Spring sunshine. We made them a few meals. They asked us for the WIFI password and if we had any spare iPhone chargers. On the last day, having caught up on their sleep and paid off some caloric debt, they spent time with us just hanging out. They didn’t speak English so we used the Google translate app on our phones, which worked surprisingly well. Then in the evening on the last day we borrowed a car seat from my neighbor and loaded them up in our minivan and drove them to the airport. I got them checked in. We connected on Instagram and that was it.
At the airport I thumbed a quick message into Google translate and handed the woman my phone. I told her that I was a soldier not that long ago and I was not a stranger to war. And that I know a little about what it was that they saw and what they lived through. That I was sorry for it. I asked her if there were anything she would want me to tell people about what’s happening there. She told me that it wasn’t good. But it had all been washed away by the kindness people had shown them at every leg of their journey. And that’s what she wants to think about. And so that’s what she wants others to think about.
The point in sharing the experience is not to humble brag about our generosity. It’s actually a point in the opposite direction. We did nearly nothing other than provide access to unused space and invest minimal time that likely we’d have wasted on watching TV or writing a Substack. But we did something that helped someone a great deal. And we enabled an exit to some form of suffering. But I’m not sure how much harder it would have to have been for us simply not to have been a good candidate to help.
If we had to pick them up on the Mexico side of the border instead of the at a church a few blocks away from our house? If we had to drive them to LAX instead of San Diego? Both scenarios likely would have taken us out of the consideration phase. Not because we weren’t willing to help. But because we had barriers like special needs kids and work schedules. The reason it worked was because it was easy. And it was easy because there are organizations that exist to make it easier for us to be kind.
We are kind people. This is true of most people. But we possess kindness at rest. I suspect we’d use it more often if we could.
Most people are good people with an inherent preference towards kindness over cruelty. That’s the faith in humankind I choose to believe in. To that end, there’s something to be said for the organizations that work effectively to unlock this kindness at rest. Because the internet has made financial transactions easier, we’ve found many ways to make it easier to be generous. Go Fund Me or other charitable giving sites come to mind. But that’s not what I’m talking about. Generosity and kindness are not the same thing. Kindness requires no resource. It’s just the output of acknowledging the humanity of another. And choosing to be something good to them. At a minimum, it’s the overt assurance of the absence of cruelty. It’s that thing that welled up in me that even while loaded out in combat gear with the mechanisms of violence hanging off of me, I felt compelled to project.
I’m not going to hurt you. I care that you are ok. I can help you if you need it.
The shadow to that light is the cruelty at rest that lives in us too. And the question of what organizations, technologies or people benefit from tapping into that. Holocaust, genocide and war are the products.
Churches, Twitter, Politics. Web 3. Machine learning and artificial intelligence.
How do these things impact kindness or cruelty at rest? It’s clear all these things increase access to both. But I’m not sure how that shakes out when you stack them up and evaluate the future. A world of integrated global competition and scarcity is possible on the horizon. Conflict of some form is certain. Somewhere running in the background is the urge for people to be kind to each other. Who is thinking about ways to enable it? If Elon Musk aims to “ to maximize the area under the curve of total human happiness..” how does that work in that context?
The old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe quote rattles around in my head when I think about that question.
“If I love you, what business is it of yours?”