Kindness as civic infrastructure

Treat everyday kindness and low‑stakes human interactions (queues, counters, transit, cafes) as public infrastructure that can fail, be maintained, and restored. Policy and civic campaigns should therefore invest in institutional designs and public rituals that rebundle opportunities for small reciprocal contact (counter‑service, civic design of transaction points, public civics curricula). — If normalized, this reframes public‑policy priorities to include the maintenance of social affordances that sustain democracy and reduces reliance on top‑down polarization remedies.