Random Acts of Kindness

Edward Renner 

When I listen to a Presidential Candidate answer a media question, I asked myself “What would I say?” to provide a personal basis for comparison.

 hat would do you on your first day in office?

I would issue an Executive Order establishing a National Week for Committing Random Acts of Kindness. I would ask every person to make a personal promise over the next week to commit at least one random act of kindness each day. The act could be as simple as standing in line with a cart full of stuff and noticing the person behind you had two items and saying, “go in front of me.”

I would also say: “We as a nation, more than anything else, need to pause our current political divisiveness long enough to experience what it feels like to live cooperatively with each other. Our vitality and freedom as a democracy, above all else, is a collective responsibility, one in which we can entrust our government to nurture the collaborative process.”

The inevitable disruptions of technological innovation, environmental collapse, breakdown of international order, and global waves of human migration that we are currently experiencing require collaborative problem solving. Ready or not, our modern challenge is how to live cooperatively, peacefully, and sustainably in our neighborhood – a crowded planet.

The age of science allowed us, falsely, to believe that we could make the present, and implicitly our national future, be whatever we desired. Now, precisely because of the predictive power of science, the future is foreseeable, and that knowledge must dictate the present if we are to have a future worth living. No one before has ever been in a position of such foresight.

The modern challenge of adapting to this predictable future is no small task. Dividing ourselves into adversaries of Democrats versus Republicans is destroying our capacity as a nation to collectively meet the nonideological external challenges of technological innovation, environmental collapse, breakdown of international order, and global waves of human migration which are real and eminent. If the United States is to be a model of a functional democracy, as the path to the future we would all hope to have, we need to demonstrate, first to ourselves, the power of collaboration, perhaps starting with something as simple as a National Week for Committing Random Acts of Kindness.

The recent hurricanes of Helene and Milton allowed many of us to experience the power of looking out for each other.