On April 28, Gabriella van Rij, founder of the D2BK movement, sat down with Yoan Ekzarh Balgarski, Secondary School students in Bulgaria for a Q&A session on the necessity of Kindness, not only now but also in our daily lives after the pandemic.
Question: Can you say that while people are quarantined [during COVID-19], Kindness is quarantined too? Or rather, is it the other way round and Kindness is noticed even more often than before?
Answer: When there is a natural disaster, we—humanity—are at our best during a natural crisis. For example, when there was a huge earthquake in Mexico, people from Japan flew in to help. Nobody asked them. They just did it! And when there was flooding in New Orleans, experts from Holland gave free advice. We, humanity, are at its best during a natural crisis—but only when it is not someone’s fault.
I’m going to give you an example. When I was young and going through a divorce, I was scared because they were trying to take my daughter, so I ran away with my daughter. I made some bad decisions during that time. But what I want to say by that is, when the fault was mine, nobody wanted to help me because they said that I did it to myself. But it shouldn’t matter.
Kindness should always matter, even when it’s not a natural crisis. For example, flooding, a volcano, these are natural crises, but we human beings, we make mistakes, and we should always be helped. I hope that this pandemic will teach us to eradicate the phrase, “Whatever, it doesn’t concern me” from our vocabulary.
Watch the full answer to the question in the video below.