“What are you turning away from because you know it causes harm?
What are you turning toward because it aligns more strongly with your values and hopes for our future?”
– Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone in Active Hope
Being kind and being nice are not the same, and it’s liberating to understand this.
There’s now — in the last decade or so — quite a lot written about this difference. I like the way Meditation Magazine describes the way these behaviors diverge:
“‘Nice’ is a self-centered behavior pattern, where you are acting in a ‘pleasing’ manner, to ‘be a nice person,’ and get people to like you;” whereas, “‘Kind’ is an other-centered behavior pattern, where you’re acting in the best interests of others, out of a sense of love, empathy, and compassion.” They say: “Kindness is rooted in love, while niceness is rooted in fear.”
Niceness manifests as the person who greets you with a smile, but won’t rock the boat when it absolutely needs rocking because conflict makes them uncomfortable since they have ideas about the way activists are perceived, and anyway, can’t we all just be nice to each other?
I don’t know why the person who made these signs chose this (or other) locations or posting them. It could be simply that it’s a high visibility location for a message. But, I also know that this is where people often stand asking passersby for spare change. We know there are those who will smile nicely to someone’s face, and then call the police on them. We know that Hartford’s Mayor and City Council just approved a budget that screws education while giving even more to an already bloated police department — a police department that routinely arrests people for panhandling. If policing meant crime or “crime” prevention, then we would see a sharp reduction in personal fundraising and certainly not the same people being arrested over and over, sometimes twice in the same day, for it. This approach is not effective and it’s not kind.
Kind would be improving overall conditions so that people did not feel cornered into standing in dangerous locations like directly next to traffic, for hours, in the hot sun, where there is never any shade, while they ask for passersby to share an amount so small it could go lost in the wash without being missed.
Kind would be solidly funding the crime prevention program known as our public education system.
