Humanity Is Alive & Well
If you regularly watch the nightly news or read the newspaper, not this one of course, then you would think that human kindness may be a dying art.
With all the selfishness, cruelty and violence we are bombarded with on a daily basis, it can be hard sometimes to believe in the plain ol’ goodness of people because we don’t want to be caught off guard and end up victims of some sort.
I recently experienced a string of small events that reconnected me to my youthful ideas of idealism. Through my social studies and history lessons in the classes of the Strengths, Barbara and Ben, and the late Audrey Ezell, I discovered at a young age that I was an “idealist” in theory. I liked to believe that the world was inherently good and that, when necessary, people would make the best choices for the greater good rather than themselves or those like them.
I was fascinated by the idea of an Utopian society but didn’t really think it was pragmatic in those times—it was the Reagan years and the Cold War was a real thing. But that was in middle/high school, by the time I reached my 20s I had become a pragmatist of sorts by dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations. Welcome to the real world!
Since the early years, life experiences tend to have made me more of a skeptic yet I try to instill parts of my youthful idealism upon my kids because I want them to harness the power of Glenda the Good Witch but also know how to deal with the likes of the Wicked Witch of the West.
As for one of those aforementioned events, my son is not really athletically minded and would rather spend his days and nights on any of his technological devices (which he is pretty nifty with so much so that his first grade classmates nicknamed him “Technology Wiz”). Now don’t get me wrong, he loves to watch sports whether tennis, soccer, gymnastics or football with his mom but playing them is another thing.
The last sport I enrolled him in was soccer last Spring and before that it was Wee Ball at age 5. He likes soccer a lot but not all the running so much and baseball was so early on that the concept didn’t really stick. So deciding that he needed more “organized outside activity” I signed him up for Fall baseball which he didn’t fret about.
After the first few practices, I noticed he had some anxiety about the season. He had taken note that some, well most, of the other players on his team seemed to catch better, throw a little farther, and bat more consistently than he. I told him that more likely than not, his team members had played each season consistently building upon their skills and that he hadn’t really played in three years. I encouraged him that with practice and hard work over time he would see improvement.
By the time the games began he had indeed improved and he had his teammates, their parents, and the parent coaches on his side rooting him on from the dugout and stands. Their encouragement each game gave him confidence which replaced his early anxiety about not being “as good.” By the time he had his first big “at bat” of the season, his coaches were ecstatic, probably more than me.
My pleas to be persistent combined with his teammates’ kindness, and the parents’ encouragement have inspired him to practice more now for another season and re-energized my idealist optimism about the good that lies within all of us, if we just let it be.