Kindness and Self Esteem

The world is obsessed with the idea of supremacy and delinquency.  It is the goal of this blog entry to attempt to establish a link between the propogation of the idea of supremacy (whether racial, ethnic, class, gender or any other concievable dividing line between humans...) and the creation of delinquency.

In other words, the more you teach (whether by word or deed) that there is a pecking order, the more people will end up on the bottom of somebody's pecking order list until we are all at the bottom.  

Delinquency is used as a means of getting attention as well as a way to vent anger and frustration.  This is especially true if the reason for the pecking order is flawed, biased or unfair.  Often these people are just like everyone else only they have low self-esteem and need someone to reach out to them and help.

So how can we teach kindness without creating a pecking order?  It is not a simple task.  Teaching kindness to children is difficult, but teaching kindness to adults who never learned to be kind as children is downright impossible.

Kindness in humans, needs to have a solid base in self-esteem.  However, there is constructive and destructive high self-esteem.

Constructive high self-esteem says to a person, "You could be the equal of anyone else in history."  While destructive self-esteem says to a person, "You already are the equal of anyone else in history and superior to many."

That's the problem is that many people tear down other people's self-esteem to boost their own.  This is unhealthy.  

ALSO, it is important to teach diversity along with kindness.  I am quite aware that in certain school districts there is a lack of diversity, making it difficult to teach in an applied way, but that does not mean that diversity cannot be taught at all.

Kindness can be broken down into 3 constitutent parts; compassion, mercy and gratitude.