The Kindness of Strangers
I’ve always loved this line from A Streetcar Named Desire (which is also just a great title) by Tennessee Williams, “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.” There are many ways to understand this line of Blanche Dubois’ and if you’re curious about them, I recommend this thread from Quora, I stumbled upon when I wanted to check that I had the line right. https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-meaning-of-Blanches-last-line-Ive-always-depended-on-the-kindness-of-strangers
Understanding it in the context of the play is important, but I have to admit, I like it as a sentence on its own. I believe we depend on strangers every day and our world needs all of us to be kind to strangers.
We depend on strangers as we drive down the road. I was in traffic recently, not quite bumper to bumper, but everyone driving at or above the seventy-mile an hour speed limit. If you really stop to think about what’s happening, it’s terrifying. But each day we drive down busy roads, depending on people we have never seen before and will never see again to follow some basic behavior rules and to stay in reasonable control of a multi-ton moving object. They are equally dependent on us. While there are certainly many accidents and injuries, in the ordinary course of events it works. People stop for nothing more than a light on a pole over the road. How many times have any of us sat and waited for the light to change even though we’re the only car at the intersection? It feels silly and it may be that we don’t want a ticket, but we know there is a cost to ignoring such lights and we stay put.
Many years ago, I had a flat tire while driving from Lubbock to San Antonio. You go through a lot of empty space on that trip and it was in one of those empty spots, many miles from even a small town that I had a flat tire. Now I understand the mechanics of changing a tire, but I had never done it. This was long before cell phones. I got out of the car and was trying to decide if I should hike or take all the Christmas presents out of the trunk and see what I could do when a Sears delivery truck came around a curve. They pulled over, the driver and his partner got out of the truck, changed my tire, wished me a Merry Christmas and headed on their way. The kindness of strangers indeed.
One of the lessons I emphasize when I teach The Leadership Dance, is that we are interdependent. On the dance floor, even the best leaders can only do as much as their beginner partners know how to do and the reverse is true for highly experienced partners. But even more than this, on a crowded floor everyone’s ability to have fun is dependent on everyone else. Someone who decides to ignore the conventions of the dance floor moving against the flow causes problems for all the dancers. The lessons of the dance floor hold true in organizations, neighborhoods, and communities of all types and sizes.
As the fires continue to rage in Southern California, reminders that we all rely on strangers every day are worth remembering. Most of us don’t know our neighborhood firefighters, but we need them to come when our house is on fire. This week, firefighters from across the country and all over the world are dropping their day-to-day responsibilities to help people they don’t know and will never meet. We are all neighbors and need each other’s help. Part of our mythos in the United States is neighborly help. Everyone going to help raise the new barn shows up in story after story. We like to believe we take care of each other. And yet as I write this our news is full of some of our elected national leaders saying California should not get federal emergency aid because some people in the state didn’t vote for their particular party.
I think I mentioned a few months ago that I was reading Rebecca Solnit’s wonderful book, A Paradise Build in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. She writes in the preface, “In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing, or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbors as well as friends and loved ones. The image of the selfish, panicky, or regressively savage human being in times of disaster has little truth to it.”
She references Peter Kropotkin’s idea of mutual aid, in which “every participant is both giver and recipient in acts of care that bind them together as distinct from the one-way street of charity.” In referencing two of the disasters she explores, Solnit quotes an author describing “spontaneous gifts were hurried to the stricken city.” We’re all aware of these kinds of responses as people across the country and the world feel a need to help in some way. While these responses don’t fit the technical definition of mutual aid, Solnit writes, “Or perhaps it is mutual in a broader sense: such aid knits together a larger society in which standards of compassion and generosity are maintained. Those who give receive a sense of themselves as members of a civilized world in which they will receive aid when their need arises.”
Which takes me back to Blanche DuBois, whether we are facing a life-threatening large-scale emergency, have a flat tire on a lonely road, or a random interaction in daily life, we all depend upon people we have never met. We depend on their kindness and they depend on us. We pay into community funds for services we all use and for some we never use (sometimes those are student fees, sometimes taxes), and we all enjoy the foresight of people who came before us and planted trees that provide us shade today. It’s important to recognize the acts of kindness and community we benefit from and to find ways to be kind to strangers and build community in our daily life. When we don’t notice those acts, it can be easy to forget just how interdependent we are.
What acts of kindness have you experienced recently? What are you doing to be kind to strangers? Here’s wishing all of us some kindness today.
Take care,
Gage
PS: Here’s an article from Civil Eats about a form of community kindness – the “Little Free” movement. https://civileats.com/2025/01/13/seattles-little-free-libraries-offer-a-catalog-of-collections-and-connections/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Lit%20Hub%20Daily:%20January%2014%2C%202025&utm_term=lithub_master_list