Slightly Off the Mark: Nice People Should Finish First, the Dolly Parton Edition

Sometimes it's nice just to be ... nice.

Being nice has gone out of favor. Our heroes these days are anti-heroes, maybe even a step over, to ... well, let's call it anti-villains. I'll come up with a better term. We like our heroes in fiction and in real life to be tough, type-A personalities who hit first and ask questions later. One of my favorite characters is Mal Reynolds from the TV show Firefly and movie Serenity. Mal is many things. More good than bad, but few would call him "nice".

We like them to be funny, but how often do we hear a G rated comedian? We like caustic, put-down humor, where one person may laugh but the next person is enraged, and the one after that embarrassed. We like to laugh "at" just as much as "with". I do it myself.

Here's an example, from my unpublished novel We Love Trouble:

Prescott stammered for a moment, giving Travis enough time to break in. “Are you capable of spelling the word ‘service’, Mr. Ascot?”

“Prescott. I, um—might I ask your business here, Agent Booth?”

“Consultant Booth. As my title might indicate, I am consulting on a case.”

“Your case requires a service dog—why?”

“For service. Do keep up, Mr. Asshat.”

“Prescott.”

Travis, the good guy, is deliberately messing with a hotel manager. Granted, the manager isn't a good guy, but at this moment Travis is pretending to work for the FBI, and riling the manager up mostly for the fun of it. Also, Wulfgar isn't a service dog, and Travis' last name isn't Booth. That's not very nice.

I guess that snippet of a scene is a bad example. In fiction, conflict is required: If you have a bunch of nice people being nice to each other, you don't have much of a story.

But in real life we spend way too much time suffering not so nice people, and not being nice ourselves. No one is perfect. Even Mr. Rogers wasn't perfect, I assume, but nobody can deny he was nice. Imagine if everyone made an effort to be nice, more often than not? It would be a very different, better world.

Then maybe we'd all spend less time being offended, and less time trying to to offend right back.

I've met people in my life who earned the title "nice". I know it's possible. I try to do it myself, although I don't succeed often enough to be another Judge Robert Probst. (My former father-in-law, and the very epitome of Nice Guy, despite being a lawyer.) Few people do.

That's even more true with celebrities, who tend to be jumbles of bad habits and bad attitudes no matter how they seem in real life. It's hard to find one who does good things more often than bad things. In other words, they're just people. Taylor Swift poops; Sadie Sink gets a runny nose, now and then.

I've never actually seen either of those, mind you, but I think it's a good assumption.

But it happens. Sometimes people are so darned nice it's hard to throw mud at them that sticks, no matter how hard a few malcontents try. We should celebrate and honor those people, especially when they do nice things they don't have to, that no one would expect them to.

It's the nice thing to do.

Although not everyone in our books is nice, we still try to give you a nice read.

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