A friend starts most Mondays by tweeting about kindness. She usually ends with “Be kind.”
Twitter swells with information that might be useful, news reports that could be true, advertisements trying too hard to catch a meme wave – and enough showoffs to form a conga line to Mars.
Subtract it all and what remains is Twitter’s biggest “feature”: anger. Think bile – piles of it – rendered in the zeros and ones of our algorithm-driven digital spaces.
Throwing “be kind” into that bitter slop may seem silly and wasteful, like hoping a Hallmark greeting card’s sappy message will save a burning house when tossed into flames.
But I love my friend’s Monday tweets. They’re two-word sermons that start my week gently and remind me to be my better me.
And not just in social media. Twitter and its cousins exhibit nastiness because we humans have a talent for being nasty. Note the humans in that equation. Social media removed the guardrails but didn’t create our ugly talent.
Kindness can’t fix everything. But it won’t hurt – and might help.
Happy Monday. Be kind.
I love that little film. TFS.