...Or How'sabout This?

In all the shouting and frustration and teeth-gnashing burlesque that defines life these days, I realized there's something we could try. It's not original. It's not clever. It's not cute. I'm almost embarrassed, frankly. But what the hell:

Be nice.

Don't even think about the why's and the wherefore's. Start small, start simple.
Give the loose coins you would take out of your pocket at the end of a day to a homeless person.
Help someone across a street.
Carry an old person's groceries.
Volunteer at a hospital.
Beautify your neighborhood.
Perform a charitable act.
Do anything that is corny and Capraesque and Christlike.
Don't extrapolate the gesture down to some political ideological nullification that merely excuses mass sloth and rampant pessimism and our country's slow, steady descent into grumbling, materialistic in consequentiality. Flip the pop paradigm of cruelty and schadenfreude on its bloated ass.
Shock the cynicism out of our system by being polite.
By being respectful.
By thinking before speaking.
By just not hating.
By knowing each one of us is here but a fleeting moment, that our present is our children's prologue and regardless of what or who we worship, revile or revere, the only thing we really need to fight is the creeping contempt for enlightenment that claws at all of us everywhere, the self loathing that allows us to debase each other, the gravity of ignorance that pulls humans downward and backward to our cruel beginnings.
Doing any one of these things can start a ripple
that builds to a swell
that gathers into a tide
that washes over and drenches anyone who ever cursed an enemy, ever spat out a slur, ever raised a hand in rage, ever spurned hope.

Be nice. I mean, you gotta start somewhere.