Here in Vermont, people are pretty nice. Locals wave to you when you drive down the side street to your home, we led the nation in vaccinations (experts have theorized because we care about our neighbor), our highway warning signs flash “Merge with Care, Spread Kindness” and in the summer, you might find a surprise zucchini on your porch or driver’s seat, Vermonters idea of a practical joke. Not super funny if your garden is overflowing with zucchini, but certainly far from malicious.

So when I read a recent article in a local newspaper about the ‘epidemic of rudeness’ my first thought was, ‘Wait, here in VERMONT? Say it isn’t so!” Maybe you have experienced this where you live but naively I want to believe, not in my state. But then I read it and low and behold it was so, this was happening in Vermont. In case you don’t read the article, one example of this rudeness is a customer banging on the bakery door for service 15 minutes before it opens and when the employee informs him he will have to wait, he drives off giving her the finger. Months earlier the bakery owner had to post a sign stating, “the person on the other side of the counter is a human being with hopes and dreams and feelings, just like you” as a response to the roughly 20 percent of the customers who were rude “over nothing.” It’s why the CEO of ZipRecruiter, Ian Seigel, said earlier this week that people aren’t returning to work because they aren’t getting paid enough to deal with the lack of civility in a COVID world. Is this our new norm? Twenty percent of people are… shall I say it…..mean?

Chatting about it in the gym, people had many theories on why someone would behave so badly.

“Clearly, that guy was not from around here.” (probably true)

“People are stressed out during this pandemic and it is bringing out the worst in them.” (definitely true)

“The pandemic has made people overly self-reliant and seemingly without the rudder of a community to hold them accountable or feel support from.” (probably true and definitely sad)

“People without a spiritual North Star or religious community do not have the accountability to behave like a loving community member.” (my two cents and true before the pandemic)

But since I’m a half-full kind of girl, this is what I think. If 20% of the population is misbehaving, that means there is the potential for 80% of the population to behave really really well, right? I got to believe, dear reader, you are in that 80% because this blog attracts that type. So what do we do? How does that 80% make a difference?

We stretch ourselves, we stretch our character from being good people to better people. This is a spiritual practice, to walk the talk. We can’t just rest on natural tendencies. We can’t just talk about being kinder. We’ve got to work this kindness thing! This takes us from being the other 80% to being the making-a-difference 80% because like the bakery owner’s sign says, that other person is another human being. As humans, we need to support each other, in a loving community so we can all rise to our potential. We acknowledge the Other by looking into their eyes and connecting with them and then we support each other. We show appreciation for the Other. The next time a cashier or waitstaff finishes your order, look at them, thank them, take that extra moment to acknowledge they exist. We aren’t that busy.

Next level kindness: We make a meal for someone who needs one. We volunteer. We become upstanders, not bystanders, by making an extra effort to support someone we witness being treated terribly. We tip a bit more, pay it forward, donate more without the wonder of how will this come back to me?. Because it will come back to you. Tenfold. OK, I just made that stat up, but I promise you, it will come back to you.

We can’t rise to our potential by doing the same thing every day, being the same person every day. Together, we can start an epidemic of kindness pushing that 80% number higher, and pushing ourselves to be better humans. Not better than someone else but being better than the selves we were yesterday. This isn’t just being a half-full kind of girl. This is being a girl with some faith.