Random Acts of Violence/ Random Acts of Kindness

Yesterday, my mother was attacked on her way home from work. My mom walks about 4 miles to and from work every day and yesterday, she was almost home–in her own neighborhood–when a group of girls ran up behind her, hitting her from behind and shoving her down onto the pavement. Then they ran off. She is quite shaken up and badly bruised and scraped up, but otherwise she seems to be okay. A man who was driving by and witnessed the whole thing stopped immediately and helped her up. A woman who had also seen the attack gave my mom a ride home. The strange thing about it was that this was a purely random act of violence. The girls did not take anything from my mom and were not trying to mug her. Who runs up to a middle-aged woman and knocks her down on the street?! She is still very disturbed about this whole event and feels violated. To not feel safe walking home in broad daylight in your own neighborhood is awful. And to not understand why someone would do this is also unsettling.

I’ve been thinking about this almost constantly since my mom told me about it yesterday. And the only conclusion I can come to is that these random acts of violence must be countered with random acts of kindness. We hear about random (and not random) acts of violence every day on the news and in our personal lives and I think these stories worry at our psyches, instilling fear in us a little at a time until we are afraid of a whole host of people and things. This fear transforms into all kinds of negative responses–depression, anxiety, paralysis in our actions, more violence, discrimination, etc. 

Since hearing about this yesterday, there has been a quiet whisper in my head, “Random acts of violence…random acts of kindness” over and over again, like a mantra. These random acts of violence cannot be allowed to define us and how we relate to the world. My mom practices random acts of kindness in her daily life all the time and this attack, this violation, will not change that. We must all practice random acts of kindness every day in our lives. We must put compassion and loving kindness out into the world in every way we know how. We must learn what we can from the violence in the world and work to neutralize it at the structural level, the systemic level, the community level, and at the individual level. That violence performed by those girls was not created in a vacuum. Those girls are not bad or evil. Their violent actions are the product of a violent system and a violent culture. And we must work to promote more compassionate systems, more compassionate communities, and more compassionate individuals by being kinder ourselves every moment of every day.

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