Random acts and acts of kindness

I was coming back from Macquarie uni at about 9:30 tonight wand my bus driver had been getting a little tetchy. Mostly at a Westy boy who first forgot to move out of the way of the back doors when they opened, which earned him a stern talking to from the driver and then pressed the red emergency button in the disabled seats section which brought the bus to a stand-still for a few seconds... and earned him another talking to.

Then as we we pulling into York St and nearly at the last stop, the driver pulled in and halted the bus, opened the doors and hopped out. This guy who'd been driving like a New York cabbie and seemed about to go postal at any moment then skipped like a schoolboy into Krispee Kreme and bought a dozen doughnuts! The whole bus lightened up and I couldn't stop laughing...

I'm doing a subject at Macquarie, Christians and Social Change: Building a Better World, and I couldn't help thinking of something that got said earlier that night. The lecturer, who I actually knew previously through my house, told a story about how he'd been in Armenia - which is a desperately poor ex-Soviet country - and his experience with the miny-cab drivers.

Apparently they're very aggressive drivers, quite abusive and quite rough with their driving. So my lecturer, Armen, got into a cab to go home after a terrible day at work (working with uni students to promote community development) and listened to this guy abusing the traffic and tried to hold on as the bus lurched back and forth in a futile stop-start manner. At this point he would dearly have loved to lay into the guy and really tear strips off him, but unfortunately he thought about it for a while and couldn't really justify doing that. He then asked what he could do to ease the situation, so when it came time to pay he smiled at the driver and handed over the cash, and then asked him to keep the change - about 100 drum or a third of his fare.

The driver kept the money and continued driving but then snuck a sideways glance of amazed bewilderment at Armen then quickly turned back to the road as though nothing had happened. Except he wasn't so abusive anymore, and the lurching began to ease and pretty soon the guy was driving almost normally. It was Armen who was stunned now.

Then the driver pulled over and an official/employer/mafia-representative asked "How much did you get today?" towhich the driver replied "Not much. I'll do better tomorrow." To which the other guy replied "You better." And suddenly it became clear why he was in such a bad mood and it also became apparent how guilty Armen would have felt if he'd told the guy off. By the way, 100 drum is about US20c.

All of this sort of thing tends to remind me of the time I was in a car and someone in front of us payed the toll for us. It was quite a surprise and just a gosh-darned nice thing to do. Of course we weren't in any need of $3 or $2.20 or whatever it was, it was just the unexpected niceness of it all that had a huge impact on our collective mood. And it was certainly well worth $3. I guess to me this is the thing in all those tangled conversations about what to do when someone asks you for money - sometimes the money and what it's used for are irrelevant and it's the response and the contact between two people that can change things much deeper than a dollar coin could ever go.

Now I'm wary of too much Californian optimism in the form of 'random acts of kindness and senseless acts of love' et al, and I know that doing the occassional nice turn is never going to fend off the military-industrial complex or the multinational corporations and nor does it resolve the existential problem of my compromised hypocrisy. But damnit, it might help someone, somewhere, a little bit...."and he saw that it was good"....and it does have the effect of softening-up select members of the public to accept the possibility that there is hope for humanity outside the eat-shop-die status quo.