Osoyoos Elementary School has just completed its fourth annual 21 Days of Kindness campaign, wrapping up the event with a rally and lunch at the Sonora Community Centre on Thursday.
Spread along the walls around the gymnasium were long chains, with each link made from a slip recording a good deed or act of kindness performed by someone at the school.
It’s all too easy to be cynical and to question why a special event is needed to celebrate what should be everyday behaviour. But that misses the point.
“It takes 21 days to form a habit, so we want kindness to be a habit,” Principal Dave Foster said a year ago when the school held the same event.
Not only do children make a conscious effort to be more kind and caring towards their peers, but those on the receiving end also gain an appreciation for how it feels.
By going through the exercise of recording kind deeds on a slip of paper, it encourages children to think about individual actions and the difference they make.
While Osoyoos Elementary engages in this yearly exercise, we can only wonder whether adults might learn something from the actions of these youngsters.
Here in Osoyoos, as with many small communities, most people are polite and civil. There’s often an outpouring of generosity from the community when a family or individual falls on hard times.
We have only to look at initiatives such as the Osoyoos Gift Cupboard, or the efforts of service clubs such as Kiwanis and Rotary to see that we live in a generous community.
It helps that people in smaller communities often default to kindness and civility simply because it’s much harder to be anonymous and word quickly spreads about the nasty exceptions in our midst.
But it’s also true that kindness is contagious. When others are kind to you, you feel the need to pass it on.
All this comes, however, at a time when society as a whole is becoming less civil.
Social media allows people to be relatively anonymous, and often to say things with a few words on the keyboard that they would never say to another person face to face.
There’s also been a tendency towards nastiness in public discourse, marked by a hardening of attitudes. The presidency of Donald Trump, who sees anyone he disagrees with as an enemy open to attack, has exacerbated this tendency, even if it started long before he entered politics.
There’s a viciousness among people who might in the past have politely and respectfully disagreed.
Social media has also bred the tendency for people to associate only with others who share their views and to seek out information that confirms their biases.
Just as kindness is contagious, so is nastiness.
It is all too easy for demagogues to promote hatred and fear of people who are different. And such hatred can escalate all too easily into horrors such as war and “ethnic cleansing.”
Perhaps it is too much to expect that adults will suddenly decide to emulate the 21 Days of Kindness. Maybe we’re too cynical, too busy making money or too set in our ways.
As the youngsters at Osoyoos Elementary get older, they too will often fall into the tendencies that affect us all – pride, greed and jealousy.
But hopefully, they’ll also remember the good habits they learned at school and this will temper their behaviour.
The rest of us can take a lesson from these students and at least learn to reflect on how our actions affect others. What we give out is often received back many times over.
