It's a crisp winter day
in San Francisco. A woman in a red Honda, Christmas
presents piled in the back, drives up to the Bay
Bridge tollbooth. "I'm paying for myself, and
for the six cars behind me," she says with a
smile, handing over seven commuter tickets.
One after another, the
next six drivers arrive at the tollbooth, dollars in
hand, only to be told, "Some lady up ahead
already paid your fare. Have a nice day."
The woman in the Honda,
it turned out, had read something on an index card
taped to a friend's refrigerator: "Practice
random kindness and senseless acts of beauty."
The phrase seemed to leap out at her, and she copied
it down.
Judy Foreman spotted
the same phrase spray-painted on a warehouse wall a
hundred miles from her home. When it stayed on her
mind for days, she gave up and drove all the way back
to copy it down. "I thought it was incredibly
beautiful," she said explaining why she's taken
to writing it at the bottom of all her letters,
"like a message from above."
Her husband, Frank,
liked the phrase so much that he put it up on the
wall for his seventh graders, one of whom was the
daughter of a local columnist. The columnist put it
in the paper, admitting that though she liked it, she
didn't know where it came from [sic] or what it
really meant.
Two days later, she
heard from Anne Herbert. Tall, blonde, and forty,
Herbert lives in Marin, one of the country's ten
richest counties, where she house-sits, takes odd-jobs,
and gets by. It was in a Sausalito restaurant that
Herbert jotted the phrase down on a paper place mat,
after turning it around in her mind for days.
"That's wonderful!"
a man sitting nearby said, and copied it down
carefully on his own placemat.
"Here's the idea,"
Herbert says. "Anything you think there should
be more of, do it randomly."
Her own fantasies
include: (1) breaking into depressing-looking schools
to paint the classrooms, (2) leaving hot meals on
kitchen tables in the poor parts of town, (3)
slipping money into a proud old woman's purse. Says
Herbert, "Kindness can build on itself as much
as violence can." Now the phrase is spreading,
on bumper stickers, on walls, at the bottom of
letters and business cards. And as it spreads, so
does a vision of guerrilla goodness.
In Portland, Oregon, a
man might plunk a coin into a stranger's meter just
in time. In Patterson, New Jersey, a dozen people
with pails and mops and tulip bulbs might descend on
a run-down house and clean it from top to bottom
while the frail elderly owners look on, dazed and
smiling.
In Chicago, a teenage
boy may be shoveling off the driveway when the
impulse strikes. What the hell, nobody's looking, he
thinks, and shovels the neighbor's driveway, too.
It's positive anarchy,
disorder, a sweet disturbance. A woman in Boston
writes "Merry Christmas!" to the tellers on
the back of her checks. A man in St. Louis, whose car
has just been rear-ended by a young woman, waves her
away, saying, "It's a scratch. Don't Worry."
Senseless acts of
beauty spread: A man plants daffodils along the
roadway, his shirt billowing in the breeze from
passing cars. In Seattle, a man appoints himself a
one man vigilante sanitation service and roams the
concrete hills collecting litter in a supermarket
cart. In Atlanta, a man scrubs graffiti from a green
park bench.
They say you can't
smile without cheering yourself up a little.
Likewise, you can't commit a random act of kindeness
without feeling as if your own troubles have been
lightened - if only because the world has become a
slightly better place.
And you can't be a
recipient without feeling a shock, a pleasant jolt.
If you were one of those rush-hour drivers who found
your bridge fare paid, who knows what you might have
been inspired to do for someone else later? Wave
someone on in the intersection? Smile at a tired
clerk? Or something larger, greater?
Like all revolutions,
guerrilla goodness begins slowly, with a single act.
Let it be yours.
