I wore this sweatshirt on a plane to and from Maui and again on my holiday flights to New York and back.  I was surprised at the number of people in the airport and on the plane who commented approvingly about it. There’s clearly a hunger for human kindness among many today.

It’s hard to miss the unkindness in the air. The way people talk to each other, the way public disagreements becomes battlefield,  the way politics has turned into a sport where cruelty earns applause and empathy is treated like a weakness. The polarization.

Some days it feels like we’re collectively running on emotional fumes.

People are quick to snap, far too slow to understand, eager to assume the worst. Politicians model contempt as if it were leadership. Commentators treat outrage as currency. Social media rewards the sharpest jab, not the wisest thought.

It’s no wonder ordinary people start absorbing that energy and reflecting it back into the world.

But underneath all this noise, there is a quiet, very real hunger for human kindness. I saw it among total strangers on my trip.

Most of us don’t  want to live in a constant state of tension.

We don’t want to be surrounded by hostility. We don’t want our politicians to model ugly words and behavior.  We want something simpler, something more human: a sense that do not need to demonize the weak or even each other, that it’s not about how to harm others or win the argument.

Kindness isn’t about being soft. It’s about being sane. It’s about remembering that we share spaces, communities, lives—and that every person we encounter is carrying things we cannot see. It’s the basic recognition that we have a shared humanity.

What’s dangerous is how easy it is to become numb. To start thinking this level of unkindness is normal. To believe that cruelty is just the way things work now. That is how societies corrode—not all at once, but by tiny increments of disrespect we begin to accept as inevitable.

But the hunger for kindness is still there.

In the relief on someone’s face when they’re treated with simple decency. You hear it in the conversations people have when they feel safe enough to drop the defensive tone. You notice it in how exhausted everyone is from the constant fighting.

Kindness won’t fix all our political problems. But it will make us harder to manipulate. Leaders who thrive on division lose power when people remember how to treat each other with respect. Outrage is contagious—but so is decency.

We can’t control the whole national mood. But we can control the tone we set in our own interactions. And right now, choosing kindness isn’t naïve—it’s countercultural.

It’s a refusal to let the worst voices dictate how we show up in the world.

The unkindness around us is loud. But the hunger for kindness is deeper. And if enough of us feed it, even in small ways, it can shift more than we think.