Are you nice or kind?
A challenge I have with this framing is it suggests a binary when none is necessary.<p>The premise is New Yorkers are Kind but not Nice, and that&#x27;s good. Well, in the context of helping a woman with a stroller vs not, obviously helping is better, even if you don&#x27;t say thanks or say anything nice at the same time. But also, why not both? It&#x27;s not like you can&#x27;t help with the stroller, AND shout a friendly &quot;Have a nice day&quot; as you leave. It costs nothing extra. It&#x27;s okay that New Yorkers are NOT like that - it&#x27;s totally fine. The job got done. But it&#x27;s not binary.<p>So the implication is that the alternative is to say &quot;Wow it looks like you are really struggling with that stroller, that must be so tough&quot;, and to offer no help in response. But, I don&#x27;t think this person exists. Maybe it&#x27;s true that people on the West coast won&#x27;t help with the stroller, but they&#x27;re NOT going to stop and empathize and do something nice while they do it. The people not helping on the subway on the West coast are NEITHER Nice nor Kind, maybe because of geography, maybe because the individualism of car-orientated culture makes people forget they live in a community the way people in New York are incapable of forgetting.<p>I propose that that &quot;Nice but not Kind&quot; caricature is actually incredibly rare to the point of non-existence. It tends to be used by the right to describe the entire left - as virtue signaling, caring-about-optics, overly politically-correct, social justice warriors. But the people who are using these characterizations are not themselves fighting for meaningful change. They&#x27;re using this exclusively to criticize caring or small incremental progress forward.<p>Yes, legal protection for trans people is more important than using correct pronouns. But who out there is preaching proper pronoun usage WITHOUT supporting legislation for protection of trans people? Tell me which politicians support these protections, and I&#x27;ll vote for them, but day-to-day I cant change the law. I CAN change what pronouns I use with my friends and strangers. So do I spend most of my time being &quot;nice but not kind&quot; because I only vote one day out of 365 for politicians that do Kind acts?<p>Even the &quot;liberal vs leftist&quot; comparison is a bit strange because it&#x27;s entirely US-centric and is part of the way that Americans fool themselves that the Democratic party is in any way progressive. They are centrist by any political spectrum definition, and as such share some of the same &quot;conservative&quot; attitudes to certain types of social progress as their Republican counterparts.<p>So yes, Be kind. If you can only be one, Be kind. But 99% of situations it costs nothing extra to Kind AND Nice. And The situations where one can ONLY be Nice but not Kind are few and far between, and tend to be exaggerated.