One of the hardest things about choosing love and kindness is the series of days when it feels like an impossible task.
Sometimes doing the right thing, and choosing kindness can be lonely. It doesn’t always make people happy. Sometimes kindness is calling out racism by name, after you’ve quietly and gently pointed it out time and time again. Sometimes the kind thing to do is to stand up to a bully, even if everyone likes them, and say No.
And that type of kindness makes people angry. People will do anything to make excuses for or justify their cruelty.
Only yesterday I got a message about the people from my last post, saying I left out the fact that the Black man invited them to live with him at first, and only changed his mind later. That someone else had financially abused them before. But what does that matter? Does it change the fact that they lived off his labor for five years? Does it change that they engaged in a violent act of racism, employing the Dangerous Black man trope? Does it change that they are still in his home, months after they were asked to leave, planning on staying for months more? Does it change the entitlement they feel to his space?
Kindness sometimes means accountability, and accountability sometimes makes people angry.
And you can only make so many people angry, and see so many people just like them come to defend them before you realize that the world is full of so much cruelty, so much entitlement, so much racism and misogyny and monstrosity.
I can pray and curse the idea of god, how can you exist in a world like this. How can you watch children suffer while fascists rip them from the hands of their mothers at the border? How can you see them starve in the ruins of their bombed out homes? How can you exist as a loving deity in a world so cursed with hatred?
How can I stay fiercely kind, how can I choose love, how can I choose kindness, how can I meet every act of malicious cruelty with peace when there’s so much out there, and there’s so little love left in the world?
How do I keep from losing my faith?
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