Why random acts of kindness should not be national news

I am a bit confused and disturbed about the viral video of the South Dakota woman helping the woman in front of her pay for diapers. In a single day it has received coverage on various national news outlets including NBC's Today show and ABC's Good morning America, while also receiving tens of thousands of hits on social networking sites. While it is encouraging to see that a significant percentage of the population is entertained and encouraged by such an act, it is equally disheartening to find that being kind warrants coverage as a national news story.

While the +Planet website was initially designed to draw attention to stories such as this, the thought was to aggregate and archive these types of interactions multiple times a week in hopes that we could help inspire people to make positive news a part of their daily routines. In doing so we hoped to begin changing the daily conversation little by little from the negative to the positive end of the social spectrum.

In following the Twitter or Facebook feeds of +Planet or any of the similar organizations that +Planet  follows, re-posts, and re-tweets through our social media presence, people can find hundreds of similar stories of everyday people making kind gestures to others within their local communities. However, now it appears that neighborly kindness is perceived by the general population as so rare, that it makes national headlines.

National news should be just that. News that affects the nation. If a local criminal stealing cars in South Dakota does not make the major networks' morning shows then how does a woman that is simply being generous? Thankfully these types of gestures happen every day, across the world. We do not need national news intermittently heralding them as modern-day miracles, we just need to begin opening our eyes and paying attention to the people around us. Heck, maybe even get inspired by the people featured in these stories and perform your own act of kindness, be it random or not.

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+Planet is always looking for content from anyone and everyone. If you know of a person, event, or organization that inspires positivity, perseverance, strength or hope, let us know or send us a story. We also accept blog submissions about topics relevant to our purpose. Thanks for reading and be sure to check out the website, follow us on Twitter @positiveplanet_ and like us on Facebook.

Being nice ain't easy (but it's the only chance we have)

Being kind and compassionate is a mindset. Just like working out with a long term fitness and lifestyle goal in mind, it takes practice, patience, commitment, and perseverance. Realistically, being outwardly kind for extended periods of time is often difficult due to the sheer enormity of the concept, and in taking a look at the daily interactions of society, it seems extended periods of authentic compassion are challenging for a large section of our overall population.

Being kind at its most basic level is fairly common. Being friendly, caring, and helpful to friends and family, for the most part, comes somewhat naturally and can be commonly witnessed in our daily lives. Behaviors such as sharing a meal, driving a friend to the airport, or calling home to say you are running late are all indicators that we are capable of regularly considering and acting upon others needs and perspectives.

However, most of these actions can ultimately deceive us into an over-inflated sense of personal compassion and kindness. For the most part, acting on the needs of our close personal relations can be either pre-scheduled or fit somewhat seamlessly into our daily routines and expectations. Thus these behaviors do not push us to begin expanding a consciousness of authentic awareness and empathy. After all, caring for the one’s we love is how most of us were raised. We were taught to do it as we learned to walk.

In extending the aforementioned metaphor of working out, we are simply maintaining the everyday level of fitness that allows us to climb stairs and walk through the mall, as opposed to beginning to develop diet and fitness routines that would allow us to become competitive athletes.

Training ourselves in the realm of kindness and compassion requires a similar commitment. In order to really begin making a difference within ourselves and our community, we must begin exercising our kindness in ways we are not used to. This in and of itself becomes quite complicated when transposed upon our daily lives. 

We have also become somewhat accustomed to overt acts of kindness and “random acts of kindness” such as holding a door open for someone or buying a stranger a cup of coffee, but again, these actions can be done when and where we personally decide. They are not necessarily internalized. While they are indeed kind, and encouraged, they are not enough.

Kindness and compassion are ultimately based on consideration for others. Consideration for loved ones, strangers we see, strangers we interact with, and strangers across the world that we will never cross paths with.

Consideration means crossing the street a little faster when a car stops for us at a crosswalk. It means thinking about strangers as human beings with families and problems instead of labeling them as gangsters, or rednecks, or liberals, conservatives, or whatever other media-influenced stereotype immediately pops into our mind. Consideration means properly recycling old batteries so they do not end up in the landfill of a third world country contaminating the drinking water of young children we never knew existed.

It means honestly considering both sides of a controversial issue, giving credence to both sides, and understanding that the truth almost always lies somewhere in the middle, far away from the politically and financially motivated extremes espoused by pundits, politicians, and professionals who in the end are most likely far more financially secure than the vast majority of those they manipulate into political strife.

Consideration means developing an understanding that almost none of our actions are isolated incidents. Our daily choices, however small they may seem, have the potential to ripple around the globe and in the current state of mass-globalization the reality of human inter-connectivity and it's consequences are becoming more evident each and every day.

With that understanding, it is obvious that none of us can individually solve the latest conflict in the Middle East nor can we personally end world hunger. The only thing we can do is be kind and compassionate to EVERYONE around us and be considerate of those we will never have the chance to meet. It is not our place or purpose to decide if certain people, lifestyles, or cultures are more, or less worthy of kindness and compassion, because in the end we are all equally worthy, but without deep-seeded, internalized consideration for the entire human population the world doesn't seem to stand much of a chance.

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Be human, be kind, be humankind

There are seven billion people on earth and I am confident in thinking that the overwhelming majority of them generally want the same things: peace, prosperity and safety for themselves, their families and their communities. With that being the case, why is it that we allow ourselves to be consistently tricked into making fear, distrust, and combativeness a significant part of our daily mindset? Why do we let politicians and media outlets set divisive priorities, and why do we let those priorities so dramatically affect the way we view and interact with people, communities, and cultures which we have probably not had the chance to understand with any substantial personal depth.

With that in mind, +Planet was developed. It was born from a dissatisfaction uncovered in a high school Media Literacy class after a semester of studying media’s role in shaping individual identities, gender roles, personal insecurities, and cultural norms. As students found themselves inundated with stories of war in history class, the threat of climate change in science class, and stories of struggle and alienation in English class, it seemed as if high school was simply designed to scare students into the cycle of societal submission that keeps us headed down the path of cultural distrust and personal dissatisfaction.

Couple that with free time filled with news, films, songs, and video games that define and reinforce gender stereotypes, violent solutions, and general disrespect, it was decided that a new voice was needed in order to begin changing the conversation.

As a result,  the experiment was launched. If instead of inundating our days with stories of violence, fear, and hatred, what if the focus of our daily media consumption centered on celebrating the everyday heroes in cities and small towns around the globe? What if we could celebrate the kind and compassionate neighbors, organizations, and global citizens that make up the vast majority of humanity, instead of being taught to fear the politically motivated statistical increase in homicide, or the lone murderer in a city far away? What if we could look beyond the divisive labels we have been trained to take as gospel, and begin treating one another as simply humans.

Understand that this is not a pie in the sky, utopian dissertation asking people to take the “ignorance is bliss” approach to daily life. It is simply a suggestion that if we address negativity productively without obsessing on it destructively, we might possibly have a small chance of righting a ship that has veered sharply off course.

In the end, kindness and compassion ultimately have nothing to do with race, religion, gender, sexual preference, political affiliation, geographic region or any other pre-defined categorization. It has simply to do with doing what most of us want; what is human, and what is kind. It is acting together responsibly as humankind.

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+Planet is always looking for content from anyone and everyone. If you know of a person, event, or organization that inspires positivity, perseverance, strength or hope, let us know or send us a story. We also accept blog submissions about topics relevant to our purpose. Thanks for reading and be sure to check out the website, follow us on Twitter @positiveplanet_ and like us on Facebook.