My friend Jill, who is one of the kindest and most thoughtful people I know, told me yesterday over lunch that today is National Kindness Day. In her words, “Every day ought to be National Kindness Day” and I couldn’t agree more. Being the over-thinker that I am, I started to dwell on the word “kindness” and what it means.
I decided to look up the definition of kindness and found that Merriam-Webster defines kindness as, “the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate.” I thought that was accurate but it struck me as odd that an English word ending with “-ness” doesn’t in some way refer back to the root, in this case “kind”, in the definition. That prompted me to search the definition of “kind” and Merriam-Webster defines kind as “a group of people or things having similar characteristics.” 
That made me think back to Hebrew school where I first learned The Golden Rule, taught to me in Hebrew as “ואהבת לרעך כמוך” translated to English as “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” So the golden rule, the moral maxim of the ethic of reciprocity, tells us to treat others as we would want to be treated and to not treat others in ways that we would not like to be treated. This basic principle of human morality can be found in just about every world religion and is a concept central to areas of study such as philosophy, sociology, economics, and psychology. At its core, it demands that we access our innate sense of empathy towards others and relate to them in such a way as to identify not just with them but as them as well.
As vegans, we are living this maxim each time we refuse to participate in a system that exploits our non-human brothers and sisters. We are saying, “I would not want to be exploited therefore, I will not exploit others.” When we opt out of a system that oppresses animals, we are saying, “I would not like being oppressed, so I will not oppress others.” Ethical vegans have already accessed this deep wellspring of empathy and tapped into it to inform them in making different life choices so as to do the least harm towards others.
On National Kindness Day, fittingly in the middle of World Vegan Month, let us all aspire to inspire others towards all acts of kindness, great and small. In so doing, we encourage others to tap into their own inherent reservoir of empathy in the hopes that they will also make this deeper connection of kindness towards all sentient living beings.
