Measuring America’s Kindness

The hitchhiker shot while writing a book about kindness in America? He shot himself. Dan Brooks zooms out:

Here is the real Kindness of America: the inspirational belief that kindness is what other people do for you, and that what you do—make up a person who shot you, for example, and then stay silent for a while even after a real person has been arrested for your made-up backstory—is pretty much irrelevant. … That’s the irony of America, too. In the world’s oldest democracy, whose guiding concern has been to maximize individual liberty, we measure our kindness by what everyone else is doing. The best way to show Americans how kind Americans can be is to write a book about it—not, say, to devote our lives to actually doing kindness on others.