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"I was recently reminded about this You Tube video. Perhaps you&amp;#039;ve seen it? It features a dude with long hair standing outside various public locales with a cardboard sign reading, &amp;quot;Free Hugs.&amp;quot; At first people walk right by him, but eventually, he starts getting embraced with wild abandon. Others take up his cause, waving signs of their own. It&amp;#039;s squeezes and love and smiles and music. All that&amp;#039;s missing is puppies and baby powder. But then his operation gets shut down by The Man. But oh happy day! His 10,000 petitions put his hug operation back on the streets. This 3-minute video is well worth watching. While I&amp;#039;m sure there was the &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s make a viral video/name for myself angle&amp;quot; involved, as well as some intentional editing to relay the story in an easy to follow hug/no hugs/hooray for hugs again fashion, the point was well made. Why is human connection such a threat? Has our world gotten so sanitized that we can chat with people online, plop our kids in padded grocery cart covers to avoid H1N1, douse our hands in sanitizer and teach our kids to never talk to &amp;quot;strangers&amp;quot; (often just lonely regular folk in check-out lines) but we can&amp;#039;t interact with real people? You certainly don&amp;#039;t have to bear hug a Jesus looking hippy in Grand Central Station to rejoin the human race, but I hope it makes you pause on how much you really take the time to talk to others. To share a kind word with a random human. The other day in Costco I bumped into an old lady in a motorized cart. (I literally almost ran her over in my enthusiasm for a free biscuit sample.) I apologized and then, added, &amp;quot;Wow, you have lovely skin.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s all it took. She smiled and told me her secret - Ponds Cold Cream. She also has 7 grandkids, 2 great grand kids, was from Milwaukee but moved here in &amp;#039;52. Her husband passed away last year. It&amp;#039;s hard, but getting out has made the difference for her. Just seeing her eyes light up certainly made a difference to me. I was able to spread that love to my own children. (Who, by the way, also had a little chat with the lady and... you won&amp;#039;t even believe this... she didn&amp;#039;t even kidnap or eat them!) That night I embraced my own husband and told him how much I loved him. Later we made love. It wasn&amp;#039;t exactly like hugging a stranger, but in some ways, it was. Rex has been working awfully late. It was nice to catch up with him again. So tell me, are you one to chat with folk you don&amp;#039;t know? If not, why? Would you hug the dude from this video? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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