Kindness is not weakness

I am of the firm conviction that kindness is the best policy - the one which will bring us furthest in life and as a species. Yes, in fact, I think the world will become a better place if we let kindness be our favorite reaction pattern when we interact with the world.
There is only one problem in this. There are people who confuse kindness with weakness, and some of these people will do their utmost to exploit such weakness for their own benefit.
And as such, there is only one way to meet that kind of people. They must be kindly, but definitely, be told that the exhibited behaviour is kindness, not weakness. And furthermore, that it must be considered most reasonable that we invest our kindness in people who recognize it as kindness and who therefore will not attempt exploit it.
(Translated from Venlighed er ikke svaghed)

Islands in the archipelago of mankind

It happens that I get past text I've written years back and want to modify a little bit in the details of the metaphors and thoughts that the text expresses. Thus the following is inspired by a text that is almost eight years old - so maybe it's about time to refresh it a bit.
I have - as it may be known - a fondness for John Donne's words from his Reflection XVII from 1624, with the familiar introduction:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind...

I think John Donne was absolutely right at that time - people of the 17th century were completely aware that they were dependent on each other. But, if we are to stay with the metaphor, the waters came flooding in over humanity and transformed us into an archipelago where we can be tempted to believe that we are islands, even though we are connected just below the surface. But the archipelago is in any case so densely covered with islands that we can easily see from coast to coast and make bridges to neighbouring isles. With today's technology, we can even see the distant islands and communicate with them far easier than you could communicate with most places on the continent of humanity in Donne's time.
The problem is however that we can just as easily retreat to the middle of our islands, turn our backs towards the coast and gaze into the ground as we let the hair grow long and our vocabulary degenerate into inarticulate grunts and murmur. But it's our duty to do the opposite: instead, we must go down to the coast; follow it around our islands; make it clear to ourselves how close the surrounding islands are to us and consider how we overcome the distance going there. And it's not a particularly unpleasant duty - it's not even difficult if we just decide to make the small effort it takes.
(Translated from Øer i menneskehedens øhav, originally published October 16th, 2017)