IT'S FUN BEING NICE, but...

(These thoughts are added to three times each week)

Life is often an echo and it can only echo what all the participants are sending out. Think about this; which kind of behavior produces the better world for you and those around you to live in? A growl or a grin? A sneer or a smile? A snide remark or a gentle reminder?

Obviously, that’s a loaded question. And while none of us can transform society into the exact shape we prefer, we can certainly make it better or worse. Our actions have a domino effect. People do tend to be more patient toward us when we are more patient to them. I still remember an airport scene where a less than patient gentleman was loudly demanding what he expected to get. Surprise! Surprise! He did not get it.

An ounce of honey is worth infinitely more than a gallon of gall, and cheap at any price. Be nice and you will harvest friends. Be grouchy and you will pile up a host of enemies or at the very least a tremendous number of individuals who will be sorry to see you come and glad to see you go.

So, if we agree nice is better, why is being mean and nasty so entrenched in our society? If we understand that “nasty” is a short fuse without restraint, that it starts and continues wars, be they national or just person-to-person, why isn’t being nice, which thinks before it speaks, more popular? Unfortunately, “nice” is too often associated with being weak, and that because we regularly stop right there – just being nice.

Being nice offers all kind of pleasant feelings, everything from warm and fuzzy to downright exciting, but by itself just being nice isn’t enough. What if nice were considered a member of the family of kindness and mercy? Now it takes on a whole new meaning. Now it has strength with the power to change the world.

It is “nice” to not say something bad about a person or segment of the population, but it is “kind” to go a step further and speak up for a person or a group being ridiculed. And as for mercy, it needs to be a verb rather than just an adjective. Nice is passive. Kind is active. Nice is “not practicing” vengeance. Kind is “giving” forgiveness.

I guess what I am saying is that we all should work extra hard at giving muscles to our social niceties. That we try to become the kind of folk who practice niceness, kindness and mercy till they are more than skin deep. Become a live-in part of our personality that is as permanent a part of us as the color of our eyes or the shape of our voice or the contour of our thinking.

This poor old world would certainly be a lot better off with a little more altruism than being afflicted by so much swine flu of the soul (piggishness).

We started with that warm and fuzzy feeling and now we have something infinitely greater. For now we encompass mercy and a more tolerant spirit and what the book of Micah speaks of so well, “…and what requires the Lord of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God?”

Have you clicked on the top right hand part of this blog "watch Neil as..." to see Neil in four films he has written and is featured in? They bring these four folk, Martin Luther, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Wesley and Abraham Lincoln back to life in our century. One was a NBC special.