RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS -- NOT
By Charlie Clark

Recently, my daughter's middle school sponsored an extended Valentine's Day celebration. The entire week was given over to what our PTA's crack organizers are billed as a local version of the national Random Acts of Kindness Week.

Williamsburg Middle School does not often select a bumper sticker slogan for its theme weeks. (To my knowledge, we've never celebrated ``If You Can Read This, You're Driving Too Close Week.")

But there was widespread enthusiasm for beating the February blahs with a dose of the old flower-power practice of surrounding your enemies and friends alike with symbols of love.

And what better setting for such a benign conspiracy than the too-often cutthroat, cliquish environment of a middle school, where people of the teen and pre-teen persuasion discover that life can be lonely, but that there is an enormous crowd of peers who sometimes feel the same way?

At Williamsburg, the parental elves have set to work launching special efforts to spread goodwill around the building's every wing, with much of the scheme kept under wraps to surprise the young ones.

I'm at liberty to divulge their unrandom plan for making it happen: On Monday, the kids arrived to see posters bedecking the hallways proclaiming ``Random Acts of Kindness Week."

Each early-period teacher reads aloud a poem entitled ``Smile" that was written by a middle school child. The teacher then asks the students for ideas on simple, low-cost acts of kindness that can be inflicted on classmates (bullies included), teachers, family members, neighbors and the community.

The resulting list is posted in the classroom, and the kids are then handed some blank forms. All during the week, they are asked to jot down any suitable random acts they've performed - while keeping their authorship anonymous - and to insert the forms in the ``Random Acts" boxes stationed in hallways.

This is supposed to create an evolving sharable record of the good works. But we're just getting started.

Yesterday, the teachers set in motion a ``student appreciation folder" on which class members will be asked during the week to scribble some kind words about each classmate.

Today, students are asked to show-and-tell some stories of their random acts so far.

Tomorrow, students will embark on a school walk-athon to benefit the economically struggling people of El Salvador, while student volunteers and parental accomplices will startle neighborhood commuters by serving them hot Starbucks-provided coffee (while subtly encouraging safe morning driving).

On Friday, parents will rustle up a sumptuous, non-cafeteria breakfast and deliver it to students as the universally favored reward for their accomplishments.

Cynics may wonder whether such an effort seems a bit programmed. But they haven't seen the creative acts that students themselves come up with.

Other naysayers may ask whether the project's impact will be short-lived. But give the Williamsburg students a chance to follow through on proposals to form long-term Kindness Clubs (don't rule out cross-county competition). If they rev up their search engines on the World Wide Web, they'll find scads of reports of Random Acts of Kindness projects at other schools and in adult communities. (Start with www.actsofkindness.org.)

A more reasonable detractor might ask us parents where we get off trying to create these perfect middle school angels, when we know full well that we were nothing of the kind at the same stage in our own lives. Point taken.

When we think back on our boldly spent youth (in my case, three years of it passed on that same Williamsburg campus), we recall the fistfights, the tacks on the chairs, the ostracism of the different and the deceiving of classmates with phony reports of secret admirers just dying to hook up with them.

But I would respond that it's precisely because we remember the horror stories that we can deduce what goes on in today's shark's-den school hallways without having to literally stop by and eavesdrop.

Hey, we're the baby boomers. Deep in our hearts, we believe ourselves to be the first generation ever to raise children. We are well accustomed to telling our offspring to do as we say and not as we did during our own terrible teens, back in the tumultuous days when giants walked the earth and the generation gap yawned its widest.

This week of random kindness acts is, like, not quite as random as it seems.

Charlie Clark is a frequent contributor to The Idler, and author of Finish High School At Home, now available as convenient online chapter downloads, from The Idler Press.