Yesterday morning I came across the phrase, “infrastructures of kindness” which moved me, instantly (from Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano, for curious minds).
The (fictional) character says, “I want to build more infrastructures of kindness,” by which he means, he wants to create sturdy ways to meet people’s emotional and physical needs in ways they are able to readily receive care.
In this case, he creates a free, weekly basketball clinic for underserved school districts in the Chicago area. The clinic creates space for providing wisdom on how to preserve and protect the athlete bodies of those who attend—but also, it’s a place for teenage kids to be esteemed. To feel that someone is looking out for them beyond—or perhaps, in place of—their home settings.
I’ve never heard anyone talk about kindness this way, and yet it strikes me as perhaps the most necessary possible thing we need in our society at the moment. Infrastructures of kindness.
Lately it seems kindness is perceived as a throwaway concept, too soft and flimsy to meet the insatiable greed of the vultures pillaging our lands. Too inefficient to be deemed useful by the least-charitable-in-all-the-Earth who are dismantling whatever infrastructures of care we had left in this country, merely to further pad the pockets (or more likely, the off-shore accounts already protected from taxation) of the ultra-selfish.