Make America Kind Again

Quiet acts of kindness suggest a growing civility, one small moment at a time. / Illustration by Chris Gash

The news report out of Jersey’s Gloucester Township in March was decidedly shocking: A kids’ weekend flag football tournament had devolved into a 40-person melee, with participants and observers shoving and throwing punches and causing such a ruckus that the cops had to break it up. This came in the wake of a celebration of Gloucester Township Day last summer that resulted in 12 arrests and multiple injuries after dozens of teens rampaged through the crowds. Then, of course, there were last summer’s Jersey boardwalk shutdowns and curfews, also aimed at rambunctious teenagers. It’s worth noting, I guess, that the flag football kerfuffle was started by the (supposed) adults on the scene: coaches who took offense at the event’s organizers. So let’s not pretend it’s just the kids who aren’t alright.

I’m not exactly the first observer to decry Americans’ increasing lack of civility. Politico reported recently on a marked upswing in political swearing, with everyone from U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett to Senator Ruben Gallego to DNC chair Ken Martin suddenly cussing a blue streak — including for publication. (My favorite: Oregon U.S. Rep Maxine Dexter and her awkward but spirited “I don’t swear in public very well, but we have to fuck Trump.”) That all the potty mouths quoted in the piece were Democrats was, Politico pointed out, not surprising: The more mild-mannered party was merely responding in kind — finally! — to the vulgarisms of profaner-in-chief Donald Trump, who drops f-bombs as readily as his good buddy Putin drops bombs.

And let’s not leave out Trump’s other best bud, Elon Musk, who’s been quoted pegging the collapse of American culture on the cardinal sin of — gasp — empathy, which he has declared the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” Let it never be said that DOGE’s top dog doesn’t put his money where his mouth is: On his X platform, he taunted Polish premier Radoslaw Sikorski with “Be quiet, small man” in a terse back-and-forth over the Starlink network.

CNN’s Zachary B. Wolf has theorized that Musk suffers from a superhero complex, a malady that appears downright epidemic lately among Republicans, who, per a recent scientific paper, are statistically far more likely than their liberal counterparts “to express negative prejudice, to engage in name-calling, and to include threats, stereotypes, and hatred” in their tweets. Hey, why not, when your fearless leader likes to heighten the level of our national security by stripping benefits from military veterans, letting food for starving children rot in warehouses, decimating scientific inquiry, and threatening the frail, disabled, and elderly with indigence?

But never fear: In this war of words, the Dems aren’t about to roll over and play dead. Former congressman and January 6th committee chair Adam Kinzinger promptly retaliated after Trump declared his preemptive pardon by former president Joe Biden null and void:

Trump’s latest threat against me is as real as his “perfect” phone calls and “biggest crowds ever.” More whining, more victimhood, zero follow-through. Either do it or keep crying, fatso. I’m so tired of your victimy whiney belly aching crap. You friggin won and you STILL are complaining all the time. BRING IT YOU SMALL LITTLE BOY.

Then former VP candidate Tim Walz called Musk a “dipshit” at a town hall. These are the grown-ups in the room?

And yet. And yet.

The other day, I was at the Giant, searching the frozen-food case for my secret vice cream. I finally spotted it among the cartons of Turkey Hill Vanilla Bean and Brownie Fudge Swirl and Double Dunker — the last two Pistachio Almonds, clear in the back on the top shelf. I reached as high as I could in my Adidas but was still at least a foot too short to attain my quarry, so I glanced up and down the aisle, hoping for an employee or maybe a strapping young lad who could clamber up the shelves. No such luck. Undeterred, I headed one aisle over, to the frozen veggies, where I glimpsed a very tall, dignified gray-haired fellow reading the back of a bag of peas.

“Excuse me,” I said hesitantly, because a world full of COVID and bird flu and hate memes and random stranger attacks induces some trepidation. “Could I impose on you to reach something for me?”

Tall Dude smiled down and cheerfully said, “Sure! What is it you need?”

“It’s in the next aisle,” I confessed, and he followed me there and looked up to where I was pointing. “The Pistachio Almond, all the way in the back on top.”

He hardly even had to stretch to snag one, handing it down to me with a conspiratorial grin. “Pistachio Almond’s my favorite too,” he confided, then gave me a little wave and headed back to his cart.

I stood there in the frozen-food section with my heart brimming over in happy gratitude — for the ice cream, yes, but also for the magnanimity with which he’d performed the favor. Maybe all wasn’t lost after all, I thought, and hurried to the checkout before my secret vice cream could melt.

That incident got me thinking more and more about public civility in this, our age of division and strife. It was still winter at the time — remember our ­blustery-cold March? — so I was taking my daily walks in the aisles of big local stores like Walmart and Target and Home Depot (and I wasn’t the only one). I tended to secure a shopping cart for these strolls, since I almost always found something I needed — rock salt or potting soil or, if I was feeling really flush, a dozen eggs. And it began to dawn on me that the fellow strollers I encountered were, without exception, extraordinarily kind. They made ready eye contact, moved their carts to clear the path, smiled at babies, made jokes or remarked on the weather or complimented a hat I had on.

Which didn’t make any sense. Where were the bitter, vituperative zealots of the internet, so intent on blaming and shaming? Who were these happy campers thronging the aisles of Wegmans and Lowe’s?

On a hunch, I shot off a group email to a bunch of women friends of assorted ages: Had any of them noticed that when it came to face-to-face encounters, the people around them suddenly seemed to have gotten awfully nice?

Ashley promptly answered that she’d witnessed the same thing. “And I’m actually friendlier too,” she admitted. “I think I’ve just given up fighting all the political and cultural animosity. I’m retreating and making my world smaller, and in said world, I want to be friendly to my neighbors.”

Nicole chimed in with her two cents: “You know, I have observed this. I think I just chalked it up to being back in the Philly area and people being friendlier here than in New York City and D.C., but maybe it actually is that people are just friendlier all around!”

Christy’s response was typically thoughtful: “I personally feel both a huge, ponderous cloud of rage that makes me feel like a less-nice person than I once was (swear more, name-call in an ugly way, far less patient with anything that seems idiotic) and simultaneously feel a need to be a more publicly good (nice, thoughtful, empathetic, generous) person than ever.”

And Regan gave a solid example from an encounter with her kids: “I’ve always been nice to everyone, even the entire time we lived in New York, and I just feel super fed up and pissed now. It’s funny, though — tonight at Benny’s basketball game, the coach from the other team pulled out four chairs for us to sit down. Then, after the game, the ref came over to Sloane and gave her a signed golf ball from his pocket. (Long story, but I think he was a former pro golfer.) Anyway, I was thinking to myself: Why is everyone being so nice tonight?”

While it’s true I have an extraordinarily kind and thoughtful bunch of friends, it did seem as though I might be on to something. And then I got an email from Jane, an online buddy I correspond with regularly. She’s retired, like me, and was worried about the possibility that Musk’s DOGE would interfere with our Social Security checks. She had this to report:

I exercised my prerogatives as an American citizen and called the Social Security Philly office and asked the guy if it was true, and he says who knows, that was yesterday’s rumor, I’ll tell you tomorrow. In the meantime, he said, go home and knit or do something else instead of worry. For all he knows, he said, he might not have a job tomorrow, but he had a good run, and it was a good job. He’s ready for whatever comes. He was brave rather than brazen, soft-spoken yet firm. I was proud of him. It was like we were both caught in a cave, waiting for the air to change.

When a harried civil servant who’s no doubt being bombarded with frantic, hysterical phone calls from elderly citizens goes this far out of his way to be kind and reassuring, you know there really is something different in the air.

In our correspondence, Jane mentioned a PBS documentary she’d watched on the 1918 flu epidemic — the one that swept the nation and killed more than 12,000 Philadelphians. (It was known here as the “Spanish flu,” the way Trump called COVID the “Chinese virus.”) One result of that catastrophe, the series noted, was a major ratcheting-up of general civic mistrust and suspicion, which is certainly what I encountered with the onset of the COVID crisis. Remember wiping down your groceries, and mask-judging other people, and the parade of holidays passing without family or friends? I saw a photo recently of a big grassy park in San Francisco that was marked off with white chalk circles in the pandemic’s early days, to indicate how far apart everyone should sit. It was a jolting reminder of that awful time.

COVID, by general consensus, ushered in a similar spirit of suspicion. Physician ­Kavita Patel, in an opinion piece for ­MSNBC, described “the pandemic’s true scope” as “the silent suffering, the economic devastation, and the erosion of social and scientific trust.” In the New York Times, culture editor Adam Sternbergh wrote about changes in our viewing preferences:

Now is a time of great paranoia, and an ambient feeling of distrust is being manifested in the streets, at the polls and on our screens. Spy films and secret-identity thrillers have long been genre staples, but the recent crop, including Severance, is conspicuously concerned with a particular anxiety: the creeping fear that you can never truly know anyone, possibly including yourself.

A few years back, I read about the establishment at Penn of a new research entity, the Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics. It sounded like the sort of place that would study such things, so I called its director, social studies and comparative ethics professor Cristina Bicchieri, to ask her how the epidemic had affected our society. She confirmed what Sternbergh and Patel had to say. “I did a study about COVID,” she told me, “and one of the things we asked about was trust. The U.S. was the country with the least trust out of all the countries in the world. It had the highest mistrust of science. Mistrust in government was quite high.” In China and South Korea, in contrast, citizens reported far greater trust in science and the government.

Bicchieri traces some of America’s lack of trust to the way science here is customarily presented: “If something is science, then it must be true. There’s an expectation.” But with COVID, that belief was shaken: “You had scientists saying, ‘We think so, but maybe not.’ This was a very new disease, one they were actively studying. But that uncertainty went against the common view of science, and this generated even greater mistrust.”

American men, she noted, had higher levels of mistrust than women. For a current study of poverty, she’s surveying focus groups in cities throughout the U.S., and as part of her research, she visited two small cities in very white, very Republican Kentucky — cities populated by the sorts of folks who scored high on the mistrust meter and elected Donald Trump to his second term. “They used to be part of industrial America,” she explained. “They worked in coal mines and made good salaries. But the mines closed. It’s a picture you see in a lot of America.” Even when they lost their jobs, they stayed where they were: “Their families and friends were there.” These laid-off employees may have gone on welfare, but they still hate the so-called “welfare state.” “They wanted to work,” said Bicchieri. “They wanted jobs. These were decent, nice people. They believed Trump would make things better for them and give them jobs. They aren’t monsters. But it explains why they make certain choices. They come from a world that doesn’t exist anymore.”

When I posited my theory about a sudden increase in niceness, Bicchieri, who’s a native of Italy, laughed. “I can tell you, coming from Europe, I was very surprised when I first came here. You say hi to strangers on the street! I thought, ‘What strange people!’ They hold the door for you. I learned this here! In Europe, they don’t do that unless you’re a very old man or woman. I always notice the kindness of people here. It’s one of America’s great qualities.”

Kindness? Really? Us, the Land of the Great Divide?

Well, yes. Bicchieri said such an increase in civility shouldn’t really be surprising: “We were home for two years! We didn’t go to the movies! Nothing was happening. We were wearing masks. You can imagine how you feel now, seeing people again. It feels really good going out.”

Or maybe, Elon Musk be damned, it’s because of our empathy. A co-worker whose wife is — or maybe was by now — a federal government employee reports that the work of DOGE has really shaken her badly: “She’s just been so down — the uncertainty, the malice of Trump and Musk, just everything. But people we haven’t talked to in years — an old landlord, for example — have reached out to make sure we’re doing okay. I think so many people are just done with the meanness.”

The Jesuit priest James Martin, a Plymouth Meeting native and Wharton grad, took to Bluesky, the kinder, gentler ­Twitter — it’s seen exponential growth in the wake of Musk’s takeover and renaming to X — the other day to put in his two cents on the empathy discourse:

A lack of empathy is at the heart of our mistreatment (and mockery and demonization) of the poor, of migrants and refugees, of LGBTQ people, and of all those on the margins. It is not only a lack of imagination; it is also a fundamental lack of mercy towards those whom some consider “other.”

In all fairness to Elon, he can’t be blamed completely for his disdain for kindness. His mom, Maye Musk, used his X to pronounce her opinion on the swell of protests against him and his auto company:

People who are damaging Tesla cars, stores and charging stations, are either paid for their criminal acts, or believe the liberal media lies and should be tagged with @IfindRetards. I’m beyond furious!!!!

True class.

There have been numerous complaints lately that the Democrats in Congress, from Chuck Schumer on down, are simply being too damned nice to Trump and Musk. Joe Klein, writing for the New York Times, observed that the lopsided empathy equation made sense, since historically, Democrats are “the party of the so-called helping professions — teachers, social workers, speech therapists, home health aides, ivy-clotted academics. In general, these are not people comfortable throwing a fierce left hook.” Maybe that’s why it was so striking when Democratic congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, in response to a jibe by Republican colleague Marjorie Taylor Greene at her false eyelashes at a hearing last May, called out Greene’s “bleach-blonde, bad built, butch body.” That’s not how JFK played the game.

Yet despite the spite-filled zeitgeist, there have been some remarkable examples of niceness even among the seemingly least likely. A New Yorker article quoted an anonymized Social Security claims representative on what he’s observed in the wake of the DOGE threats of cuts to the SSA:

“We service people at their best and worst times,” he said. “People heading into retirement, surviving spouses, widows, widowers. It used to be we’d get complaints from the public. We’d start off a call by apologizing. ‘We’re understaffed!’” Now, he went on, “people are apologizing to us.”

That’s the living embodiment of empathy.

According to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll taken in February, nearly 50 percent of respondents disapproved of Musk’s work for the federal government, while only 34 percent approved. You’re nicer when you know someone who’s been hurt by the actions of Trump and his cronies — and who doesn’t by now? This may be especially true here in Philly, the town of “We’re all we got, we’re all we need.” We’d rather hang together, as Ben Franklin posited, than hang separately. And the petty meanness of Trump and his minions makes it so easy to conclude, “Damn, I’m a better human being than the richest guys on Earth!”

In her new book, Me, But Better, Olga Khazan, a writer for the Atlantic, talks about the power of what psychologists call “weak ties” — “casual acquaintances with whom we interact, but usually only briefly.” In other words, precisely the sorts of nice-making encounters I’ve observed more people around me having, in the supermarket aisles and on city streets. According to Khazan, studies have shown that those of us who have lots of these weak ties — who make small talk with the produce guy and say hi to the mailman and smile in sympathy at beleaguered moms whose kids are melting down — are happier than people who don’t. So Khazan has embarked on a mission to do more of this low-key socializing, which she says makes us feel more “woven into the social fabric.”

Remember my friend whose wife works for the federal government? I was telling him about the guy who got my Pistachio Almond ice cream down for me, and he had this to say: “I was at Giant the other day, and an older man looked up at the top shelf, winced a little, and looked down at the floor, kind of near my shoes. I would have helped him anyway, but that little glance toward me made my heart sink. I went over and got his hot sauce down, and he was just effusive. He said he didn’t want to bother me but was so thankful. It does seem to be these little things.”

Hey, maybe he and I and Khazan are just fooling ourselves, living in a dream world where nefarious characters like — well, like you-know-who — are going to make mincemeat of us nobodies. That may very well be. Just the same, I’ll keep on making eye contact and smiling, because I believe such niceness represents the world I want to live in — the America I want to live in, one that recognizes that beneath the countless differences between us, we really are all the same: tiny temporary sparks orbiting one another in a great vast darkness, trying our damnedest to keep our little lights alive.

Published as “Make America Kind Again” in the June 2025 issue of Philadelphia magazine.