In New Zealand, September 1 is Random Acts of Kindness day. Official suggestions about what you might do (randomly of course) includes washing someone else’s car or paying for the person behind you in a drive-through line. Out of 13 ideas for suggested activities, six of them have to do with transportation (they would be all car transportation, except that one of them is paying someone else’s bus fare).
Even though the acts of kindness are, according to the title of the day, random, 6 out of 13 is 46%, and if you assume there are (for the sake of argument) 30 categories of human activity, then each category would have a 1/30 chance of randomly occurring. Repeat that 13 times and the actual expectation would be that, randomized, a given category would be represented, on the average, far fewer than 6 times. In fact the majority of categories wouldn’t appear at all.
Now, given that I’ve simply conjured the idea that there are 30 categories, the numbers here aren’t in any way conclusive. But I think it’s reasonable to posit 30 different categories of possible activities (I bet you could do it in five minutes). And having a 46% representation of one type of activity (or even 38% if you discount the bus thing) is, to say the least, suspect. Maybe there’s something going on with the supposed “randomness” of these acts of kindness.
The inspiration of New Zealand’s Random Acts of Kindness Day was the US, where the holiday has been celebrated (on February 17) since 1995. New Zealand adopted it as of 2004. But why, one wonders, emphasize the “random” aspect? And how, one wonders, did transportation come to predominate in the suggestions?
For more information, we can investigate similar celebrations around the world. Some of them are daily — Free Money Day is a global celebration on September 15, and Good Deeds Day is on March 16. In the first case, the suggestions are simply “leave money as a surprise” and “give money in person.” In the second, the original organizer (Shari Arison) simply recommends that participants “think good, speak good and do good.” No categorical bias seems to be present in those cases. So let’s look further.
Volunteer Day, December 5, was instituted by the United Nations in 1985. Transportation hasn’t infiltrated its recommendations (at least not yet), as there don’t seem to be any other than simply offering volunteer assistance in some way to, well, something. But given more time (a whole year for example) would it be the same story? Luckily the UN designated 2001 as the International Year of Volunteers. But once again, any nefarious inroads by transportation were thwarted by the diplomatically insulated language from the UN; the objectives of the Year were simply increased recognition of volunteers and their contributions.
National Philanthropy Day has been November 15 in the US since 1986, and was adopted by Canada in 2013. Neither of the proclamations includes a single word about transportation, and neither do the lyrics of its theme song: “Now More Than Ever.” But wait — “Now More Than Ever” was written by Marvin Hamlisch, who famously wrote the scores for movies including (pay attention to the titles), “The Swimmer” and “Take the Money and Run.” You’ll have noticed, I’m sure, that both swimming and running are forms of transportation (sort of), even if the connection is tenuous.
Delve a bit deeper and you’ll find that Hamlisch was also the co-writer of the1967 hit song “California Nights.” Performed by Lesley Gore, it peaked at #16 nationwide in March, 1967. Its popularity was undoubtedly boosted by this little-known fact: two months prior, Gore had performed the song on television when she was playing an accomplice to Catwoman on the Batman TV series. And what comes to mind when you think of Batman? Obviously the Batmobile — more transportation!
Now, Batman has a strong connection to good deeds and the like, and Batman himself (not to mention Robin, the Boy Wonder) is, as everybody knows, a volunteer. The TV show explicitly promoted good behavior among its teenage audience, as Batman repeatedly touted the benefits of wearing seatbelts, doing your homework, eating your vegetables, and drinking your milk. The Batmobile from the TV show was a real car (and still is; it sold in 2013 for over $4 million) built by George Barris.
Barris had a lifelong career building custom cars — many of them for movies and TV. Some of his work was iconic, including the Batmobile, the Munster’s car, and the Beverly Hillbillies’ truck. And some was less obvious. In the movie “North by Northwest,” the bad guys try to run Cary Grant off the road by crashing their car into the back of his. It was Barris who built a custom front-end for the bad guys’ car so it would collapse more easily. Also Grant was driving (or it looked like he was driving) an expensive Mercedes Benz, and the producers didn’t want to damage it too much.
Barris, with his career in and around automobiles, could be a key connection in the lack of randomness in the Random Acts of Kindness official list. Remember that the day was first established in the US in 1995. Two other things of note happened in 1995 — in September, in fact. The European Parliament elected the first European Ombudsman (Jacob Söderman), and Sony released the first PlayStation.
Jacob Söderman is Finnish, and has amassed a large number of commendations and awards, including the Finnish Humanist Union Prize and the Consumer of the Year Award. He was (or possibly is) also a member of a little-known organization: the Group of Wise Persons (I’m not making any of this up), evidently organized by the European Union to do…something…but it’s very difficult to discover exactly what.
The PlayStation was a tremendous success for Sony; it was the first video game console to sell over 100 million units. Sony was in competition with Nintendo and Sega at the time, and focused on third-party developers rather than the in-house game development approach used by its rivals. They ended up with well over 3070 games (and counting), including a huge number of transportation-centric titles; racing games, driving maze games, demolition derby games, and so on. There are also, and remember this, a number of James Bond-related titles.
Locked in such cutthroat competition, and as a newcomer to the video game console industry, Sony needed to capture every possible advantage. Remember one of the movies George Barris built a car for? “North by Northwest.” Cary Grant plays Roger Thornhill — and what work does he do? Advertising. Who built the Batmobile? George Barris. Who wrote the hit song performed on Batman? Marvin Hamlisch. Who also wrote hit songs for James Bond films? Marvin Hamlisch. It’s all connected!
Sony needed tie-ins for their subtle advertising campaigns (remember “Live in your world, play in ours”?) If they were going to insert subliminal cues to “think about cars and transportation” into a new feel-good holiday — one that came into existence the exact same month and year of their new product launch — who better to plant a few influential suggestions than a global diplomat added when the PlayStation was launched into a shadowy, behind-the-scenes organization like The Group of Wise Persons?
So now that you have more information about Random Acts of Kindness Day and just how random its suggestions are (or are not!), you can decide for yourself what kinds of nice things to do in New Zealand today. It’s up to you; I’m just the messenger here. And a messenger usually needs some kind of transportation, too. Hmmm…
