Why Kindness Alone Is Not Enough

It has to lead to us disruption & sabotage at the structural level

I am going out and about at the end of the month/beginning of September. I am going to be doing some readings and Q&As and book signings in a handful of places (with more to come in the Fall).

27th Aug - Happy Medium Books - Jacksonville ,FL @7pm

30th Aug - Wild Goose Festival - Harmony, NC @4pm

31st Aug - Main St. Books (with Stephanie Stalvey) - Davidson, NC @4pm

10th Sep - Big Foot Books & Brews - Marion NC @7pm

21st Sep - Highland Books - Brevard, NC @6pm

Come and say hi and get your book signed!

Why Kindness Alone Is Not Enough

The older I get, the more convinced I am that there’s no such thing as just a moment. There’s no such thing as an encounter that’s merely incidental, peripheral, or without consequence.

Every interaction—every instance of presence with another person—contains within it the molecular possibility of either affirmation or diminishment. Not just in terms of feelings, which are notoriously slippery and easily manipulated by marketing departments, but in terms of something like actual human dignity. A quality that, despite sounding dangerously close to a Victorian moral virtue (dignity! nobility! uprightness!), remains one of the few things still worth fighting for in the digital-age trenches of ironic detachment & algorithmic self-optimization.

Let me put it this way: If you’ve ever cried in a pharmacy aisle because the person in front of you paid for your cold medicine when your card declined, then you already know what I mean by “molecular.”

That moment didn’t change your housing status, your credit score, your food insecurity, your exposure to state violence. But it did change something. Something invisible but undeniable. The person looked at you, saw you, and said (without saying) you are not disposable. And in that, your dignity, which had begun to dissolve into the linoleum under the flicker of the fluorescent lights, was reclaimed. Not in total. Not forever. But in that molecular way. One atom of soul re-solidified.

This is the power of kindness. Real kindness. Not the smiley-faced version that gets printed on tote bags sold by brands who ripped off an Instagram artist. I mean the kind that costs something. Time. Attention. Risk. The decision to witness someone else’s pain & personhood without flinching or fleeing.

This kind of molecular kindness is essential. It’s holy. It’s a form of resistance against the numbing dehumanization that capitalism requires in order to function smoothly.

All of us who have ever had a corporate job can tell you that it is non-viable to run a profit-maximizing enterprise that also insists on seeing every worker as a full human being with needs and limits and aching parents and sleeping children and migraine auras and bad dreams. At scale, it’s impossible. That’s why kindness continues to feel radical. Because it interrupts the machine. Just for a beat. Just long enough for the person in front of you to take a full breath and remember, maybe, that they are not just the sum of their output.

But—and this is the part that makes decent people shift in their chairs and clutch their crystals—a politics of kindness is not enough.