Do the Decent

A simple but powerful strategy

The Good Samaritan by Luigi Sciallero, 1854 (public domain - Wikimedia Commons CC0 1.0)

“Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.” — Henry James, 1902

Angelo Siciliano was born in the Calabria region of southern Italy. When he was ten years old, little Angelino (as he was called) moved with his family to Brooklyn, New York.

It was there that Angelino discovered how cruel the world could be. A small, sickly child, he had a delicate frame and wasn’t able to withstand the rigors of exercise—even ascending the stairs to his family’s ground floor apartment made him winded.

And so the bullies piled on, as bullies often do.

One day, on a class trip to the Brooklyn Museum, he was enduring the daily torment that plagued him. So he sat alone on a stone bench in the main hall, waiting—as he did most days—for this day to end.

And while he was sitting there, his gaze wandered to a statue across the hall. A sculpture of t…