Kindness in an Age of Hate
You’ve been feeling it too, haven’t you?
In the last forty minutes of Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), Ke Huy Quan leads the only scene in the last decade that has made me bawl in a public theatre since the death of the grandmother—looking so much like my own—in Moana (2016). Quan’s character Waymond begs a crowd in a tearful speech to stop fighting. Everyone is scared and confused. He doesn’t know much, but he does know that it’s especially important to be kind while the world is so lost.
In moments of panic and doomsday prepping, I often return to that climactic performance. However, there’s another scene earlier in the film that people seem to gloss over.
After Alpha Waymond explains to Evelyn that their alternative daughter is building a weapon to destabilize the universe, he asks her if she can feel it too. Something is off, he huffs. As if speaking directly to the audience, using Evelyn as a proxy, he tells us that the world is not right through the joking lines of Taylor Swift lyrics. Our institutions are crumbling, he goes on. Nobody trusts their neighbor anymore. And you stay up at night wondering to yourself—
How can we get back? Evelyn interrupts him.
Growing up, my mother lamented this similarly. In her childhood, the youngest of eleven, she was spoiled by her older siblings and parents when they had the time and funds. As she got older, she noticed the separation amongst them deepening. Fewer of them returned to their hometown for family reunions and birthdays. Each year the holidays felt less important than the last. My grandmother was gone by my early teens and, for years to come, my mother struggled to cope with the loss. Personally, I also sensed the startling differences each year, but I said nothing. It was, in my pubescent opinion, her duty to improve the situation as the primary adult in the lives of me and my brother.
Admittedly, I’ve found myself feeling a similar despondency these days. I scroll on social media shooting distrusting glances at silly videos of animals or people with hot takes. I can’t be quite sure that what I see is real anymore. Artificial intelligence is more advanced than ever and whether or not we take precautions to make sure our work isn’t scraped, it is always at risk. Going on dates no longer feels like an adventure of securing partnership but instead, an interview to join someone’s roster or a never-ending battle of nonchalance. And perhaps this is a symptom of living in Los Angeles, but even hanging out with friends now seems increasingly competitive and mildly nerve-wracking.
Yet, I’m conscious of an inability, or perhaps unwillingness, to change those feelings.
Last year, on Easter Sunday, a man stopped me at a gas station on my way to see a blockbuster film with some friends. He needed just a little bit of money for gas. Granted, I really did have very little to spare when I denied him. I was being polite and honest, but then I went inside. I bought a Gatorade. There the cashier upsold me: two for five dollars. I took the deal.
Ten minutes later, I sat inside my car outside of the movie theatre, drinking my first “meal” of the day. I checked for red-stained teeth in the rearview mirror. I thought about how the money I spent could’ve gone to better use. Frankly, I was going to spend another $15 on the movie ticket and another $50 or so on groceries before heading home. What was just five dollars?
I don’t reflect on this to self-flagellate by any means. My savings is nonexistent and I have been refused money for worse reasons. Besides, the world had recently watched a group of faux astronauts launch themselves into space for less than twenty minutes using an unspeakable amount of resources and causing unnecessary pollution. Queue Gil Scott-Heron’s Whitey on the Moon.
Still, the moment eats at me. Where could we all be by now if we were just a little nicer?
When I was a little girl, I used to cry real, hot tears over my mother being rude to a stranger or making a snide comment about a family member. It was genuinely upsetting. I wasn’t worried about her soul or anything; I was relatively agnostic. I simply believed that being rude to anyone was a sign of our failed progress as a species. It scared me more than anything. While she rolled her eyes, I would preach to her about how “we all bleed red” and it was important that she knew that.
My friends and classmates didn’t see this side of me at all. School, especially in my racist hometown, assured me that all bets were off. Dominance was important if you didn’t want to get stepped on. Any time I lowered my hackles, I was in for being mocked, shamed, or generally humiliated, even by teachers.
These days, I mourn the version of myself who was able to feel so deeply. She’s still around in a mild way bringing out my joie de vivre, but I can sense how she has been sanded down and muted. She’s become an involuntary cryptid, ashamed to come out for too long and face those who don’t believe she’s real or who may think that she has ulterior motives. Especially distressed by the people who seek to take advantage of her, she hides, and I don’t blame her.
I’ve even used these words pejoratively against my own communities, knowing in the back of my mind they’ve been deployed to discredit the people I love. Now, I challenge myself to get to the root of my discontent instead of using what feels like shorthand slurs. Hotep implies false spirituality or manipulation. Instead, I mean to say I’m disappointed in Black men who are quick to subjugate or abandon other Black people, especially women. Tenderqueer mocks sensitivity and, of course, has a tinge of homophobia to it. I don’t want to be around the type of queer person who weaponizes therapy-speak to avoid doing dishes or apologizing for explicitly racist comments.
As I’ve become more adept at reading and relating to others, I’ve noticed how crucial it is that we become more honest and kind. We have seen what happens in the absence of these things. Mistreatment sows distrust. Distrust eviscerates unity. Lack of unity ruins the forward progress of movements. No progress begets an era of fascism.
The details of the Sam Nordquist case took me weeks to fully read, and even longer to process. Sam’s final days consisted of some of the most sickening descriptions of cruelty I’ve learned about in my lifetime. I feel no need to list them.
Sam was a 24-year-old trans man from Red Wing, Minnesota. He worked as a caregiver in group homes for disabled people. He had cats, nieces and nephews, and loved to dance. Being shy, he found some of his community online, eventually falling for a 38-year-old woman based in western New York. A month into correspondence, considering himself in love, he decided to fly out and close the distance in his relationship.
The trip was only supposed to span two weeks in the fall of 2024 but it eventually became three months. After messages where he didn’t quite sound like himself, and after his mother failed to hear from him in the new year, Sam’s family reported him missing in February of 2025. One day before Valentine’s Day, his body was found brutalized in a field 50 miles from the home of his girlfriend (read: abuser). Sam had been tortured for days by the woman and a group of her friends and family. Later, she and six other suspects—the youngest only 19—each acquired a charge of first-degree murder with depraved indifference.
“Depraved indifference murder,” also known as “depraved-heart murder,” refers to gross negligence resulting in someone’s death. The legal dictionary Justia further clarifies it as “a callous disregard for human life … demonstrating a morally corrupt mindset.” Other cases with similar charges include those of Freddie Gray, George Floyd, and the death of overdose victim Sarah Harris at the hands of her much older dentist boyfriend.
It’s worth emphasizing that Sam’s offenders committed this crime in a group. Allegedly, there were even minors involved in his torture. They were being taught by the adults surrounding them that this human being was worth being treated this way. Even more, I believe those adults felt the world would sympathize with them. After all, they have seen laws being passed globally prohibiting trans participation in sports, restricting free movement, and limiting interactions with children. Daily, they witness blatant disregard for the lives of queer and trans people, for Black people, for fat people. So why wouldn’t they believe that Sam’s life was worth nothing?
He was lured across the country with the promise of love, and ended up lliving the worst nightmare of our queer and trans communities. When we’re rejected by our families and friends, we seek closeness wherever we may find it and cling to it when we do. Sam’s alleged murderers knew this before trapping him. Nothing could be more cruel, in my opinion.
A couple days after Sam’s discovery last year, I was here in Los Angeles keeping an eye on the 77th annual Writers Guild Awards Ceremony as it played out on social media. It’s where the writers of your favorite television shows get their flowers. One speech made the rounds in a short video clip.
Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan, now being praised for Pluribus, had just won an achievement award for his contributions to television writing. In his acceptance speech, perhaps feeling guilt over his past choices, he issued a plea and a bit of a warning to his fans and aspiring writers. Writer Destiny Jackson summarized his win for Deadline, and I’ll save you the curiosity: no one in the article’s comments took this moment to dust off their reading comprehension.
Gilligan went on to say,
As a writer speaking to a room full of writers, I have a proposal. It certainly won’t fix everything, but maybe it’s a start. I say we write more good guys. For decades, we’ve made the villains too sexy. I really think that when we create characters as indelible as Michael Corleone, Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader or Tony Soprano, viewers everywhere, all over the world, they pay attention and say, “Those dudes are bad ass, I want to be that cool.” When that happens, that’s when bad guys stop being the cautionary tales that they were intended to be. They [instead] become aspirational. So maybe what the world needs now are some good old fashioned, greatest generation types who give more than they take.
White women with an ounce of power loved to behave like Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in the workplace after the popularity of The Devil Wears Prada (2006). Many a man has laughed at the “savagery” of Denzel Washington’s Frank Lucas executing a man in broad daylight during American Gangster (2007). Not a Halloween has gone by where I haven’t seen at least one person, especially a child, with their face coated in makeup to portray the Joker or Pennywise.
With the growing love of shock-value media and the spectacle of cultish death-rings like in Squid Game (2021), Blink Twice (2025), or Opus (2025), Gilligan isn’t alone in creating villainous characters by any means. He can just tell first-hand what the exaltation of increasingly erratic or deplorable behavior has led to. These characters are no longer shocking to the masses. Instead, we look up to them, escaping accountability, and aspire to outdo them, becoming worse than ever.
At the end of last year, I had a short stint on TikTok for the first time. I had spent quite a few years online in my youth and I feared the endless scrolling, my brain a sponge to anything it encountered. But a combination of curiosity and a demand from my job compelled me to open an account.
Every other video affirmed some permeation of the “bad guys’” influence on pop culture. As the “friend who was too woke,” I was being annoying. Influencers I didn’t know held my hand while they said it but that man just didn’t like me and I was being stupid for believing that he might. Random people were filmed injuring themselves, having public breakdowns, or simply dancing to their favorite song unaware that they were participating in a nonconsensual trend.
None of this was new, just packaged differently. The same message I had received growing up was being imprinted onto a new generation. You shouldn’t care too much for anyone or try hard for anything. You might end up being laughed at like everyone else on the app.
Fearful of an algorithm bound to place me in the feed of people who, in bad-faith, would find a way to misconstrue my thoughts, I wanted to shout above the Miranda Priestlys in the making and the would-be-Hannibal Lecters. By being consistently mean, tolerating harm, and turning our cheek when we encounter vulnerability, we are all contributing to that decay of institutions and destabilization of the world that Alpha Waymond fears.
Last year, in Gainesville, Texas, an 11-year-old committed suicide after being bullied about her family’s immigration status. In Canada, despite losing the real national election, conservatives won a mock election amongst schoolchildren. And online, we continually hear about the consequences of “manosphere influencers” shaping the minds of young men who go on to embrace patriarchal values through incidents of road rage, mass shootings, and femicide.
Still, I tried to make the best of joining, sharing videos of Black feminists who had informed my understanding of the world. Angela Davis speaking on the long-term costs of liberation. Octavia Butler’s novel research melting into an eerie prediction. The most popular — gaining nearly a million views in just under two weeks—was my favorite clip of critic bell hooks in a 1997 interview (“Cultural Criticism and Transformation”) I found on Kanopy, discussing appropriation and its critical link to fascist ideals.
Her video in particular likely acquired so much attention because of an instant recognition of the subject matter’s relevance and the resurgent popularity of her book All About Love, released in 1999 but rearing its head again after 2020, bringing her name to the attention of younger people.
In a chapter on societal values, hooks echoes the 1997 interview, saying,
Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience … Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love, we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.
A friend recently tried to convince me that he genuinely believes love does not exist, likening his indifference to being an atheist. I countered by telling him that there was no way he would have made it to today without even a crumb of love in his life. I was hesitant to bring up the severe amount of fear with which he moved about in the world, worried I might be overstepping. I did, in fact, recognize this same fear in myself. Love is the obvious cure for us both.
I sent him a copy of the book. Perhaps he disagreed with hooks’s writing, perhaps he refused to read it. Either way, we haven’t spoken to each other since.
I struggle to be kind. Like the interaction with the man at the gas station, I wonder constantly what impact generosity will have on my bottom line, even when it’s minimal. On occasion, life’s abundance seems clear and, for a moment, I can see that it is infinite. Those days make me feel most gracious. But on days of buying into the lie that there’s only so much to go around and one must grab-and-dash before others do, I am purposefully small and selfish. It seems counterproductive to pass around what little I have. Ego tells me that I’ve given so much more to others than they would ever think to give to me.
I’ve started doing something to combat this regression into defeatism when I feel it rising up in my spirit: I think about the future. The present isn’t doomed by any means. But tomorrow holds promise. I don’t necessarily know if having children is right for me, yet I still think in terms of descendants.
Everyone in the future is my descendant and yours, and just as it was the job of generations before us, it is our duty to prevent their passive disappointment with the state of the world. We must work to nourish, not bury, their kindest selves. Though it may be true we can “never get back,” we can create something better than we’ve ever experienced before.
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