Be Kind, Damn It
Chuck Reece says it's time for kindness, damn it.
We did not plan for all our stories this week to touch on acts of kindness because Thursday was National Random Acts of Kindness Day.
But as we reached the end of the week and it came time to write the weekly “Editor’s Corner,” we discovered that we could find kindness in all our stories.
Jordan Blumetti wrote a great story about the fine (and deeply eccentric) Florida writer Padgett Powell. In this story, Powell recounts the time when his house in the swamps was flooded by Hurricane Irma, leaving him to recruit “an eclectic band of neighbors to ‘hump’ his antique furniture upstairs to dry ground.” Swamp dwellers: there when you need them.
In Shelley Johannsson’s essay about her family’s decades of sewing, making bandages for the wounded in wartime to making masks to ward off COVID-19 in more recent days.
Jennifer Crossley Howard closes out the week about some big acts of kindness that changed the course of her life.
Does every good story have kindness in it? That kind of question makes you go, “Hmmm.” But I think the answer to it is yes. In all good stories there is tension — typically between good and evil. Kindness is one of the forces for good. In my life's story, I’m keeping my eye out for the moments when I can be randomly kind to someone else. I think maybe I should follow the rule that Kurt Vonnegut laid down:
“Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies — 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.’”
Chuck Reece is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Salvation South, the weekly web magazine you're reading right now. He was the founding editor of The Bitter Southerner. He grew up in the north Georgia mountains in a little town called Ellijay.