The upside of being on crutches: The kindness of strangers

In April I had surgery on my foot and needed crutches to get around. I eventually was able to abandon them in favor of a walking boot but, about a month ago I had a bone biopsy because the bone infection the surgery was meant to treat didn't heal. I've been on crutches since.

What being on crutches has shown me is that people are uncommonly kind - or rather that kindness is common.

I'm a grey haired senior guy. I'm not used to men holding open doors for me. I'm not used to women stopping their cars to help me move a garbage can, or to carry a package from Amazon I'm struggling to get from the mailbox to my apartment. But they do. They do it so often it has changed my opinion of how much people care.

But -- I'm a white guy with a car and an apartment. An older white guy. I live in a town in Oregon, USA that's largely white. So when people see me they see someone like them, or their fathers or grandfathers. They don't make the moral judgments they make when they see the homeless. They have empathy for me, at least in part, because they see me as one of themselves.

Still, it's nice to see, and maybe some of them do extend that kindness to people they identify with because of their common humanity, without seeing race or economic status as a barrier.

I hope they do. I try to.

Hopefully, you do too.