Unexpected kindness in the mail

It all gets a bit grim out there sometime, with appalling events happening around the world, with great injustices and cruelties that go unanswered by anybody with the power to actually do something about it.

There's so much coming down the shit pipeline every day, that it can be almost overwhelming when somebody performs a tiny act of kindness out of the blue.

I got a pile of mail that had somehow got lost in the system suddenly appear recently, and among it was a small run of recent 2000ad comics from an online comic book retailer. I had no idea how they got there, although I do remember buying something from that same retailer years ago, and assumed at first that somebody had mixed up the address somehow, and accidentally sent all this thrillpower to the other side of the world.

But there was a name on the packing slip - it was a total dude named John in the UK - and I emailed him about it, and he told me he had read my complaining about the difficulty of getting the Galaxy's Greatest Comic in the sci-fi year of 2025, and bought some recent ones to send to me.

It's not fighting a great injustice, and I know I'm a pretty privileged motherfucker in life and love, but I was genuinely touched by John's gesture, because it helped remind me that people do good things without being asked to, without being forced to, just because it's a nice thing to do.

And kindness inspires kindness, and passing empathy forward is always emotionally fun and spiritually profitable. After John's inspiration I went out and donated blood for the first time in ages, and gave more to the charity muggers waiting outside the supermarket than I usually would. They're only tiny steps, but tiny steps still get us somewhere, especially if we all take them together.

Unfortunately, because the entire global postal system has broken down, it somehow took six months for John's kind gift to get through, (along with eight months worth of Empire magazines), and by the time they got to me, I'd already got those issues of 2000ad elsewhere, and now they I have doubles, but it would feel weird to sell them off the same way I get rid of most of my comics, so I'll have to find some worthwhile person to give them to - I did think about the local hospital, but 2000ad is most definitely not for kids any more.

Anyway, do something nice when it's not your turn. That's the lesson I got in the mail last week.