If cruelty is the status quo then social conformity would be perpetuating that cruelty. In such a cultural regime kindness is non-conformist, and therefore punk.
A reminder that the black panther party ran breakfast programs for children in poor neighborhoods, distributed vaccines and medical care, patrolled communities to inform people who were engaged by police of their rights at great personal risk, and started a rehab program where former criminals would escort the elderly on shopping trips to protect them from muggers. They broke several laws doing this and several more were created specifically to target them. They were regularly attacked by police and defamed in the media. That’s punk.
Cruelty really isn’t the status quo. You could argue like on the government side of things that there are corrupt officials and things like that and they are cruel.
But if you look at the average person and the average neighborhood and judge the way they think and feel and act, you’re going to find kindness dominates over cruelty and the human nature is generally positive.
And 50% of the time the “kindness” people expect of you turns out to be tool of repression by keeping you in line with what is the expected norms.
If cruelty is the status quo then social conformity would be perpetuating that cruelty. In such a cultural regime kindness is non-conformist, and therefore punk.
A reminder that the black panther party ran breakfast programs for children in poor neighborhoods, distributed vaccines and medical care, patrolled communities to inform people who were engaged by police of their rights at great personal risk, and started a rehab program where former criminals would escort the elderly on shopping trips to protect them from muggers. They broke several laws doing this and several more were created specifically to target them. They were regularly attacked by police and defamed in the media. That’s punk.
That would be poignant if it were true but it’s not.
Cruelty really isn’t the status quo. You could argue like on the government side of things that there are corrupt officials and things like that and they are cruel.
But if you look at the average person and the average neighborhood and judge the way they think and feel and act, you’re going to find kindness dominates over cruelty and the human nature is generally positive.
And 50% of the time the “kindness” people expect of you turns out to be tool of repression by keeping you in line with what is the expected norms.
Don’t be kind, be you.
Performative cruelty is everywhere. Sure slow it down and people are nice. But its pretty radical to just be kind from the get-go.