Polly Vernon: I Had No Idea How Good People Were, Did You?

There’s this video doing the rounds; it’s a few weeks old, which makes it about, what? 45, 46, in corona years? But it still makes me cry every time I see it. It shows a Spanish taxi driver arriving at the hospital to and from which he’s been ferrying patients, free of charge, through the epidemic, and being applauded by medics.

One minute of jerky iPhone film pans from him – strapping and awkward at the hospital doors, shifting from foot to foot – to the doctors and nurses, grinning and cheering beneath surgical masks, off their half-hidden faces with the joy in giving rapturous credit where it’s due.

There are thousands of examples of these vids doing the rounds: mini showcases for the many acts of casual, potent, pragmatic kindness this crisis has engendered. They proliferate on an hourly basis. I collect them like football cards: moving monuments to how endlessly decent we are, after all.

I had no idea how good people were two and a half months ago, did you?

Not just the people in the memes. Not just the big names: the Captain Tom's, the Kia Tobins– the 17-year-old care worker who put a photo of the face of the wife of one of her residents on to a cushion for him to hug. Everyone. My mates. My neighbours. My colleagues. My bloke. Strangers I pass on the street. Shop workers. Bus drivers. Chemists. The 750,000 people who signed up to the NHS volunteer scheme, within hours of it being opened. The furloughed professionals, giving up services for free. The big and small brand designers who’ve turned their factories and workforces over to PPE.

Anyone who asks anyone else, ‘How are you?’ and discovers they really want to know. Anyone who, en route to the shops for essentials, calls up to a neighbour they hardly know, asks if they can grab something for them, while they’re there. Everyone who gathers on steps or leans out of windows on Thursday night, to clap the NHS, yes: but also to revel in a moment of mass, shared, widespread togetherness, that suddenly obvious and precious feeling of being part of something big, beautiful and human.

I’d thought we were doomed by our own selfishness, honestly, back when lockdown was first mooted, and the nation responded by stockpiling loo roll. It seemed like only a matter of time before we were all holed up in mini survivalist compounds, hurling rocks at neighbours if they came too close. It also seemed like a natural progression for a civilisation that, for the preceding decade, had got its thrills screaming at strangers on social media, its respective world views so narrowly defined and deeply entrenched, it had no hope of connecting with someone who didn’t share them absolutely.

But now, ideological tribalism and online cruelty seem like embarrassingly outmoded concepts. Who’s got the energy or the time? Now, I recognise the loo roll blip for what it was: the death thralls of our meanness. One last implosion of our capacity to think only of ourselves, before our compassion took over, and the next thing we know, all we’re thinking is: what can I do to help?

Where’s it come from, this torrent of mutual care? Science, in all probability.
In 2019, Dr Kelli Harding, a clinical psychologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York published The Rabbit Effect: Live Longer, Happier, And Healthier With The Groundbreaking Science Of Kindness, a book that referenced a 1970s study into the wellbeing of rabbits, then extrapolated that positive connections with others – achieved specifically through the giving and receiving of kindness – lowers our inflammatory responses, making us less prone to disease. Being kind isn’t just a moral imperative – it’s a physical one.

But I also think it’s an unexpected consequence of social distancing, which has both made us realise how much we really, truly need other people – and made us see them, for the first time. Literally, because we’re looking for them, looking out for them. And on a humanitarian level, because there is real courtesy in walking down the street, or negotiating a supermarket, so as not to place others at risk from a deadly virus you have no idea if you’re carrying.

Every time you walk two metre circles around another person, you demonstrate care. You acknowledge their humanity, you recognise their vulnerability, you tell them you value them, you’d rather they didn’t get sick. That’s how we move through the world these days, with kindness, with the practical application of love. We’re getting good at it.

Read all of the good news and acts of kindness we've seen during lockdown...