Twice in the past few weeks, I have been criticized for being “too nice.”
Yes, criticized and no, I’m not trying to brag.
This semester I have been interning at a small nonprofit organization here in Harrisonburg, learning alongside social workers and volunteers and working to provide financial support to those in the community who cannot afford necessities like water or heat.
I work with people that most would consider being “pretty nice”- they studied for years in college in an effort to one day make their corner of the world a better place and they nearly always participate in blood drives.
They are pretty nice, but they lack compassion. They often speak poorly about clients, judging the young mothers with multiple children and the drug addicts who come in for help from the confines of the back office. They have no sympathy for any embarrassing tears shed by those who come in to ask for help.
I understand a little bit, I guess. Working intimately with the public for so long, watching people struggle due to a lack of appropriate aid, occasionally having to deal with the belligerent and entitled individual – that can wear on a person. That can result in dialing down the empathy a bit in an effort to separate work from life.
But that doesn’t make it acceptable.
It doesn’t take a genius to point out some of the areas in which we, as human beings, are lacking in compassion. Take a look at the unnecessary ventures of Elon Musk, the continuing nonexistence of universal healthcare in the United States, zero-tolerance policies in schools, the recent “aggressive actions” towards an LGBTQ+ student here on campus…shoot, earlier this week I watched a Vice mini-documentary titled “Children in Yemen Are So Hungry They’re Eating Their Own Hands.”
Being “nice” is not enough. Being “nice” reeks of ingenuity and the surface level. Being “nice” is easy. Being compassionate is sometimes more difficult, but it is worthwhile.
At my internship, I was criticized for being “too nice.” What about? The fact that I put in a little more time and effort to help a single mother with two young children regain water after being without it for a month and the fact that I didn’t cheer when one of the volunteers in the office said she hoped every unvaccinated person would just “keel over.”
My coworkers called it “too nice,” but they’re confused. What I was demonstrating was not niceness, but pretty basic compassion. It wasn’t difficult; it wasn’t impressive.
My hope for you, reader? To practice compassion rather than just kindness.
To be the kind of person that others deem “too nice.”
