Kindness Is a Cause Too

Call it a seven-mile exercise in civility.

On Sunday morning, about 250 people walked, wheeled, biked and skated through the streets of Huntington Beach. No, they weren’t a million moms opposed to gun violence. Nor were they gays and lesbians seeking the right to register domestic partnerships.

Instead, these marchers supported a simpler but no less heartfelt goal: promoting niceness.

The Kindness and Friendship Walk, sponsored by the Hebrew Academy and open to anyone, was about such things as helping someone less fortunate, lending a sympathetic ear to a friend in need and resisting the urge to tease younger brothers and sisters.

Academy student Meir Pinkerson, 8 1/2, ambled the whole seven miles--one for each day of the week that niceness is required. Dragging a partially deflated pink balloon behind him, Meir said he had to coax his mother out to Huntington Beach City Hall, where the walk began.

“So far, I’ve thought of two reasons for me to be here,” the precocious Long Beach resident said. “For exercise and because all the cars driving by are seeing hundreds of people walking around and being nice.”

Long Beach resident Sue Stein urged her family to make the trek because people sometimes forget--or even ignore--basic values in their daily lives. Other walkers pointed to wars around the world and scuffles down the street as evidence of the struggle to maintain common decency.

The walk began with more than 50 of the faithful at City Hall; more people joined at several stops along the route back to the Hebrew Academy. The intergenerational crowd, from the stroller-bound to the elderly, held signs reading “Make Amends. Be Friends,” and “Just Be Kind.”

The trek evolved out of a kindness and friendship week at the 400-student Hebrew Academy.

“During that week, there was such a positive influence,” said Rabbi Moishe Y. Engel, who organized the event. “Parents told us it was making a difference at home--that their children were becoming more aware of what’s kind and what’s unkind.”

Now students are rewarded with a paper brick when they’re caught committing a mitzvah, or good deed. Those bricks are pasted together to build a wall; if the wall contains 1,000 bricks by June 5, the students will get a mystery treat.

Marchers Paula and Ronan Cohen said they have already seen the effects of the kindness push in their three children. When their 2-year-old daughter recently became upset after spilling water down her shirt, her older brother soaked his T-shirt in solidarity.

“They encourage [niceness] at school so much that you don’t have to tell them,” Paula Cohen said. “The children run up and say, ‘Mom, I did a mitzvah.’ . . . They do sweet things for each other.”

Early Sunday, Ronan Cohen displayed his contrarian streak by jokingly proposing a counterdemonstration. “But it’s one of those marches that’s hard to be against,” he said with a laugh. “I did realize that we were blocking traffic, so there may be someone out there who’s against us.”

Blocked traffic notwithstanding, no protest backing belligerence and enmity arose.