Subtle Kindness

 Recently, I read an article which talked about a recent school shooting. Many of the students were given the impression that because the shooter had violent proclivities, it was somehow up to his fellow classmates to bestow "kindness" upon him in order to have prevented his violent behavior. A student who tried to befriend this person has reported that in her attempts to try to bestow kindness on him, he behaved violently and inappropriately toward her. The student concludes that people should never feel obligated to bestow kindness on someone even if they appear to be a "loner" with tendencies toward violence.
   I am reflecting on this issue, because I do wonder whether educators perhaps need to exercise care in the way that we teach/preach about kindness in classrooms. It's obvious that many of the students are indoctrinated with the view that it's good to extend a certain kindness toward all people, regardless of how that kindness is received or whether the receiver even truly benefits from it or wants it. People thus are brought up to think of kindness as a kind of moral injunction-which is often exactly what it is in many religious texts. "Be kind to..." is often understood as a divine commandment and a moral obligation that people have a duty to somehow fulfill or bestow evenly on all people. However, as I did learn in my recent experiences at the Timekeeper retreat, the way we handle situations is to first know what the person's situation is, as well as to clarify it using wisdom. Indiscriminate kindness can lead to a sort of almost blind or stereotypical vision where we smile at people and treat them nicely in the hopes that they will change from "frogs" into "princes" overnight. But what is implied in this vision of kindness is a kind of social control. Implicit to this notion is that if I am nice to you, eventually you are going to be nice just like me. Now why doesn't this work most of the time, you might wonder?
    I think the answer is that most people eventually get the idea that, when kindness is "dispensed" in this way toward them, they are somehow being tricked into doing something or even manipulated to feel a certain kind of obligatory reciprocity: "I scratched your back, now you scratch mine". Kindness becomes a game or a strategy that people use to please people who are powerful or in authority, rather than being a genuine emotion that arises from one's interactions and even a real compassion for someone else. This kindness is more a kind of social conditioning than it is something that comes from a real insight into how another person is doing in life. Not only do the receivers feel that it isn't genuine (that is, being done for the sake of an ideology) but the givers feel completely burned out and betrayed in their acts of kindness. Their kindness doesn't even feel so real to themselves, let alone others.
   I wonder if perhaps if people weren't so pressured to be any certain way, that they would perhaps naturally have more room to empathize with other beings. That is, maybe this "kindness" we are looking for arises precisely when we drop all the "looking for", "seeking", "striving" or even "pretending" for the sake of getting accolades and avoiding blame. But I think what's at issue here is that people are never given a chance to drop these pressures and pretenses. We are living completely in this sealed off pressure dome, where everything we do is monitored and given a label. This is happening for so long, in fact, that there is no room to even appreciate who we are inside of us. As a result, we hardly are able to feel anything for others either, because we are so cut off from who we are deep in ourselves.
   To go back to my original point: people may have to honor the depth of uniqueness in a person's soul before thy can develop a genuine respect.  This is not easy to do if people are never given the chance to see their own souls and to be valued for their souls. But the way to do so is to appreciate that we come from distant lands, which aren't necessarily limited to this present life. We can never fully know the mystery of who a person is, and when one sees someone who is violent, the first thing is to know that this is someone who needs special kinds of care and attention. The second is to recognize that this person must be suffering a lot in not being able to connect with people in nonviolent or creative ways. This gives rise to real compassion, to know, "well this person must be having  a real hard time with this issue. Even though I don't share their struggles, I have my own struggles in some aspects of life". This self reflective compassion is much more nuanced than the sudden jump to "you must be kind to everyone you see".