About that cup of kindness – –
Let’s take a cup for a few of the auld lang synes of 2017, in the highest hopes for this brand new year.
A cup for the planet. Despite the best efforts of the Environmental Destruction Agency to foul the air and water, and similar efforts to open up our lands for desecration and private development, this fragile globe survives. You can Google “Good news for the planet” to boost your spirits. Here’s a toast to everyone who switches to solar, picks up litter, and pays attention to ways we can protect our grandchildren’s heritage.
A cup for women! Beginning with the inspirational Women’s March and marching through to the #MeToo movement, women have earned more than a little kindness yet. They won’t get much of it in the reproductive justice realm. You cannot confer rights on a fetus without denying rights of the woman carrying it.
Anti-abortion forces sneaked wording about rights of “the unborn” into the harsh new tax bill, so chalk one up for regression into the dark ages of womankind. But here’s a cup o’ kindness toast to every #MeToo, as well as to heroes like Willie Parker out there fighting to protect all women.
A cup for people of all faiths working together. There may be constant headlines, not to mention tweets, designed to set us against each other, but interfaith groups across the country are determined to keep respect and mutual support alive. Google “Interfaith work” in your city or state and find how many kindnesses are underway.
A cup for the hopeless. Remember those huddled masses yearning to breathe free? They’re still out there, in force: refugees and asylum-seekers, people mired in poverty or joblessness, sick children without healthcare, undocumented immigrants in families being torn apart. 
But if our government is turning its back on them, a multitude of individuals and organizations are working around the clock to get the lamp lifted again. Google “Help undocumented immigrants,” or “Fighting poverty in my community” for starters. Cups of kindness abound.
And a cup of kindness for kindness’ sake. A group of people with vastly diverse backgrounds and philosophies met just after New Year’s Day to talk about how to retain optimism – hope, at least – on all of the above in the face of current divisiveness and a mentally unbalanced president. Said one member of the group: “It helps to commit conscious acts of kindness throughout the day. Might be just a tiny thing, but it makes you feel better, and kindness can be contagious.” Pope Francis thinks so. In his New Year’s Eve homily he expressed optimism about ordinary people going about their lives doing ordinary acts of kindness. The “artisans of the common good,” he called them. So here’s a toast to every artisan of the common good. May we all join their ranks this year.
Belated Human Rights Day greetings to all. In case you missed it, Human Rights Day was celebrated around the globe on December 10. It was the 69th anniversary of the proclamation of the 
Another woman with a passion for human rights was 
Dr. Willie Parker wants the moral high ground back.
Both encountered a turning point, he explains, on hearing Martin Luther King’s famous last speech which included the biblical story of the good Samaritan. In that story: after others had passed by a man in need a Samaritan stops to help. Those who passed by, Dr. King said, worried, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” Parker writes in Life’s Work that “What made the Good Samaritan good, in Dr. King’s interpretation, was that he reversed the question, ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’” Immediately after hearing that, Parker writes, “Once I understood that the faithful approach to a woman in need is to help her and not to judge her or to impose upon her any restriction, penalty or shame, I had to change my life.”
