Sunday 14th May

Too often, far too often, we are cynical.  Especially in the face of the brutality of the World.  And the desperate news emerging day after day from our television sets makes it easy to think that people are simply greedy and selfish and cruel and that the World is getting worse.

But we often forget the little acts of kindness which bind us together.  Humans have only just emerged as a species, and as hunter-gatherer’s for a couple of million years we lived in family groups where everyone knew each other, much like chimpanzees do in the wild today.   They cared for everyone in the group but were suspicious of other groups, often fighting them.

But the emergence of farming and people becoming established in small villages changed things.  It soon became good practice not to eat everything but to store some for bad times.  Seemed like a good idea but inevitably some people were in charge of the food and enriched themselves.  The rest is, as they say History.

But now we have huge cities and huge disparities in wealth, getting larger by the day.  And it seems that life in many ways is getting harder.  Capitalism has no conscience and will do whatever it takes to keep the profits rolling in.  And humans are still adjusting to living in such conditions.  And yet inside the family group, or among close friends there is still kindness and compassion.  It is just a bit harder to share our food and homes with strangers.  But we are still capable of kindness; it hasn’t quite been knocked out of us by the World we live in.  And it is our greatest strength.  It costs nothing and surprisingly, small acts of kindness are still appreciated, and often rewarded in their turn.  And despite the News life is still better in many ways than our rose-tinted memories might have us believe.  I can still recall seeing notes in windows “Room to let, No Blacks or Irish”, and Homophobia was the order of the day; queer-bashing was still common in the Eighties.  So, in many ways we are more tolerant.  Many of us have welcomed Assylum seekers into our country, we have befriended and accepted different races and cultures into our own.  Small acts of kindness may indeed be our only hope as a species.