We Can Have an Impact

On a cold snowy morning a few days ago, I was walking as fast as I could to catch a ferry. Forty-five brisk minutes later, I was still about three-quarters of a mile from the dock. Suddenly, a woman pulling out of her driveway across the silent two-lane highway honked at me. She was offering me a ride! I darted across the road and hopped into her warm car in a cascade of gratitude.

Acts of kindness are what we have. Nothing can stop us from countering a general withdrawal from decency with generosity, immediate and personal. Concerns like maximizing power and profit may trump all other societal objectives, but individually we can place other purposes at the forefront of our lives and abide by them. This stranger’s action — going out of her way to give me a hand — changed the course of my day, but much more shifted for me. I saw that our impact on each other holds greater significance during this fraught time. Fellow feeling, compassion for a stranger out in the cold, comes naturally. Let’s call this a moral imperative. Such self-evident awareness stands outside of politics, ideology, or any of our other divides.

There are many kinds of things that we just plain know — like taking turns when an accident makes four lanes of freeway converge into a one-lane road, or that someone who has demonstrated loyalty and steadfast positive contribution toward their workplace deserves to be treated fairly. We know what fairness is and we know when it is not being upheld. We know the difference between someone tripping over their dog unseen in a hallway and someone kicking their dog in a pique of misdirected ire. We are in a context now of misdirected ire going in all directions, skirting the constraints of right and wrong most of us learned in kindergarten.

What to do? On that snowy cold morning, I saw that we each have the power to decide to go out of our way for each other. Someone receives a kindness and then feels inclined to extend a hand to someone else. This becomes an expanding intention, one person at a time, one situation following another, the urge to pay it forward that makes your day. Now is the time to stand up for a higher level of conduct than is usual or easy. Let’s risk some inconvenience for the sake of the kind of society we want to live in.

Copyright: Wendy Lustbader, 2025.