This I believe, and this I am.

Artist: Michael Leunig

The vast majority of the race ... are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves. 

Mark Twain wrote those words; I concur with them. Perhaps the 'aggressive and pitiless minority' among us now are the people who are touted as the 'top 1%' -- the billionaires ... and those who aspire and aggress themselves to that most insular club.

I am not 'secretly kind-hearted' -- The few who have known me know also that I don't have it in me to behave with cruelty towards my fellow humans. Occasionally, I've wished that I did. 

We all have an 'aggressive and pitiless minority' in our lives. What do you do in relation with yours? Do you bide them? Run from them? Do you ever fight back? Have you ever returned contempt with contempt? Or do you heap the tar you wish you could fling at another onto yourself?

Gentleness is the antidote for cruelty.

Those words are Plato's. I wish I could agree with him. There are some who use another's gentle nature as an accelerant for malice; perhaps, if there is anything humane left in them, they must inflict agony upon others so they don't feel their own.

A gentle will, alert and measured respect, and intent to be harmless -- these choices usually evoke the same in our fellows. When they don't ... the gentle are maimed.

There is a secret person undamaged in every individual.

(Paul Shepherd)

Yes, there is. How, though, does one decide to keep that 'undamaged person' a secret? What are we that we make such a choice ... and how is it that so often, we inflict the damage done to us upon others?

And what of we who keep our damage in secret? 

What of us is humane, and what merely human?

When kindness has left people, even for a few moments, we become afraid of them as if their reason had left them. When it has left a place where we have always found it, it is like shipwreck; we drop from security into something malevolent and bottomless.

(Willa Cather)

I will continue to be kind. I know, in my bones, no other way. I cannot help but wonder, though, if my gentle nature will be my undoing. Predators scent the blood of those they perceive as weak; human predators feel glee when they know they have prey in their sights. We tend, I suppose, to be more deer or more lion in nature ... more dolphin or more shark.

How can we live beyond predator and prey? Does kindness really have a place in human concourse ... or do we always and only use others for what we can take from them, whether or not they have something to give? Is it possible, to paraphrase Franklin D. Roosevelt, that 

... kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free person. A person does not have to be cruel to be tough ... ?