“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal...

To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”

- Rebecca Solnit

I’m starting to think that the same might be true for kindness, that word that can be so empty and meaningless in practice - except not that Instagram-quote kindness, not the one used as a way of ducking immensely difficult conversations and shying away from rage-inducing differences of opinion, but as something like the extinguisher you wrench off the wall when the building is on fire.

(You know who is frequently kind in comic books? Superman. The guy with the power to punch continents in half. I think about that a lot.)