The TV illuminated the small office that day as an impressionable 10-year-old watched flames engulf the pillars towering toward the sky. On that day a young girl realized the world was broken, that mankind possessed the ability to harm one another.
   Fast forward a decade — 10 years of war displayed daily on the nightly news and a 21-year-old, slightly jaded, scrolls through the nightly news on the CNN app at the end of her fingertip, and reads about a country killing its own people and another country oceans away with a government grappling over a decision on the morality of its own citizens or the morality of a population it knows not by names or social security numbers. A decision filled with impossibility, because how can anyone pose an innocent life against another and force an answer? It was this day I discovered that if there was to be beauty in this world, we were the ones who would have to bring it with us, take it with us, second by second, moment by moment, with each random act of kindness displayed to another being.
    I am not a child of war, merely a bystander through millions of digital pixels funneled through the Internet onto my screen. As I open the New York Times photo of the day, I am met with a disclaimer: “This image contains graphic content.” The image, sanguine and brutal, portrays an elephant, a man and a pool of blood. There are no words to explain the Kenyan mall shooting, only human emotion failing to grapple with human cruelty. Two vast emotional powers posed against one another, capable from the same species. There are not enough emotions to grasp the scene bored into my eyes, only a heavy heart and a hand swiftly raised to cup the gasp swiftly inhaled.
 Can one act of kindness change the world? No, but a million acts of kindness have the capability to raise a generation exposed to kindness instead of the hate and opposition displayed on the nightly news. Kindness raises a world shrouded in hope instead of war. Every time mankind chooses to support his fellow man, instead of engaging in enmity, he writes a new story. A story no longer characterized by brokenness, but one with millions of random acts of kindness woven together to illuminate kindness in the face of darkness.
    In a New York Times opinion article written in response to the Kenyan mall attack, Stanley Gazemba, a Kenyan, had this to say, “If the militants think what they are doing has terrified us, they are wrong. All they have done is bring us closer together. A visit to the blood donation center will confirm this. In those lines, our political differences and the endemic corruption of our bureaucratic systems recede.”
    We live on the only planet that naturally provides nourishment, oxygen and water — all the things needed to sustain life. Every day we are bombarded with more aesthetic beauty than opportunity will provide us to experience. But kindness? That’s a beauty we as people must carry with us. It comes from the human heart, and it’s a beauty only we alone provide, through our daily choices as individuals that inhabit our natural world. It’s an understanding that arises by vulnerability to beauty and a sacrificial disregard for comfort;  equiping a heart to bring goodness in a broken world.
   In a world where we are berated daily with images of war, 50 percent of children will grow up in broken homes and hearts can be broken by merely watching the evening news, I have to wonder how our generation has managed to become anything but an army of cynics.
   Yet there it is, resilience — in the kindness of a stranger, in the embrace of loved ones and in the decision that though the world may tell us otherwise, we choose daily what type of world we want for ourselves and for the generations to follow. With each act of kindness, we counteract every act manifested by the hardened hearts of individuals, and single-handedly reverse a cycle of numbness and disbelief in one’s fellow mankind.
  Because as J.R.R. Tolkien oncewrote, “The world is indeed full of peril and in it there are many dark places. But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater.”
   So today, as you read this, please look around, and try with all your might to find all things bright and beautiful that grow in the morning light.