Please.

I’ve had enough of sappy sayings about kindness on social media. We don’t need another one. We don’t need anyone else crooning over charities that help little bald kids with cancer, posts about how much money you raised for kids in a distant country. When charity and kindness looks cool for you, you slowly lose that inner tug of compassion, and it just becomes another show.

Please.

Let somebody else raise the money, put on the benefit, organize the charity. You be the one to care.

I was not the one to care. There was a girl named Georgia who went to JAM time, our church’s children’s ministry on Wednesday nights. Georgia’s mother was a cafeteria lady at the high school. Georgia was a tall, chunky girl, and she crashed noisily through the pages of her pew Bible. She had teeth that stuck out, spoke with a lisp, and dragged a plastic baby doll. When she left town, nobody noticed. Georgia was intensely friendly and clingy; she became my shadow and called me, “Fwendy.” I never could escape her calling me, Fwendy!!! Fwendy!!! But one night, I was stuck with her for some game, and I wished she would go hang out with somebody else—I even wished she would be partnerless rather than tugging my arm. I tried to get away from her, but she demanded where I was going. A stringy girl in glasses shouted something that amounted to, “Go away, Georgia, we don’t want you.” At that moment, I saw her freeze up, her joy melting. She had thought I was a kind girl, and I didn’t say anything to stop that bully. I didn’t think anything of it, because I thought Georgia was a pesky brat who had it coming. Still, I was no more an oddball that Georgia; maybe I was even more. We both went home with Blow Pops and Bible verses printed on strips of colored paper. But I was not the one to care.

Everywhere I go, I see people not caring, not even looking, like they have a built-in pair of eyes that look right past “them.” Like they have an invisible filing system in their minds that divides us between invisibles and those not visible. They don’t even mention it because it’s such an obvious fact of life.

The weird kid.

Hah hah, look at the weird kid! Look at that nerd! Let’s make a movie about nerds, name a candy after nerds, make nerd Halloween costumes, and even have Nerd Theme Night at the church’s children’s ministry club!

As soon as people know you’re good at something, the word nerd comes out. Even though it sounds like normal talk to call things nerdy, and it could even sound like a compliment, does anyone notice how we are treated for it deep down? Nerds in popular culture are often portrayed as the “deadly dangerous quiet kid,” the one who is so antisocial and drawn into his own little world that he lashes out with unthinkable violence, leading to an anti-nerd apocalypse. There’s a sense of us-against-them. They’re mean, they’re cliquish, they’re out to get us, they’re! they’re! they’re!

What’s behind nerd paranoia? Fear that the “normal” kids, who shame other kids for being nerds, might actually be nerds themselves. Everyone who mocks a leper is inches away from becoming one.

In an instant, you can change from a person to a label. There is always danger of finding that you are not part of a herd, that you are all alone in the universe. You have to laugh and pretend that you and the other normal people have this secret understanding that the “nerds” are outside of. You have to pretend you know what acceptable behavior is. Anyone outside of the sacred normal circle is a barbarian, a savage, someone who must be stopped, even to the point of violence.

“Oh, he’s the kid nobody likes…”

Who is nobody? If only person steps into the madness of liking the kid that nobody likes, is that person “nobody” also? How can there be a few of nobody?

Christian kids are not immune from joining the cult of “in.” You know those particular kids at youth group—the ones who never have any danger of sitting alone, the ones who vividly talk about their relationship with Jesus, because their trendy personalities are magnetizing. They please the youth pastor and the other leaders to the point where they’re always on the worship team under the spotlight, always showing off some new trick, always winning a prize. They’re always at the end of the photographer’s light, and they are the only ones shown on the promotional material. Even if they make a show of being socially awkward, they put the average non-speaking church guest to shame with their ease of making jokes and their cloud of “wholesome” friends. Nobody fails to tell them they’re beautiful, loved, talented, amazing, and spectacular.

Of course, though, those kids aren’t the whole story. There’s that boy named Alex. Nobody knows his last name. Nobody knows anything about him except that he shows up, says nothing, and leaves. Every year, he gets taller and taller, and he badly needs a haircut. He looks like a tree in the forest, covered in moss. Asking him a simple question is like drawing water from the bottom of the river. When the squirrely kids swarm with pool noodles and slices of pizza, he is isolated and alone. He is the only one who wears a mask, and he stays distant, reserved. If there’s an empty-looking row of seats, he sits at the end of it. He says he is doing good, if you ask him hard enough. But the leaders have given up trying to interact with Alex, more attracted to the vivacious, friendly kids. Every week in the summer, he is perched on the end of the same island in the same spot in the parking lot, pecking at the same phone.

I’ve seen a young man with Down’s syndrome wandering at youth group by himself, month after month. When I brought a girl who was a foster child as a visitor from August until October, not one student at the youth group spoke to her. We were stranded on our parking lot curb, drawing designs with gravel because we couldn’t stand the games that had been organized. We just wanted to go home. One youth leader texted me, looking where she’d gone, and tried to see that we got home safely together. But that was all. Welcomed as a visitor once, people like her fade into oblivion. The popular, artistic kids go on and on, never knowing a dull moment. Foster kids…well, why don’t they interact more? Why should we talk to her? Who is she?

From the time we were children, we knew those who had and those who had not. We had to find out who we were around them.

There was Devero, a crack baby. There was Joey-O, who wrestled with my brother over a plastic pear. There was Jasmine, whose parents gave her beer mixed with apple juice in a baby bottle, and who acted in such hyperactive, destructive ways that nobody would want their little kids to play with her. There were the kids who ran out into the street because nobody cared enough to watch them. There was Julia, the little Polish girl, who felt so much wrongness at her city school that she begged to be homeschooled by her playmate’s mom. And that’s just the beginning of the people I’ve heard of.

I will never be anything but a nerd. From the time I was five till I was fourteen, I was known only as the short girl. I am always wondering what it is about me that makes me get up and move away as soon as we sit at the same table; why people’s souls scrunch up their noses and twist their eyes to try and understand me better. Maybe it’s that I look too little and can’t talk loud enough. I guess I’ll never know.

Well, I’m not the one to know what is right and good, if I can’t even care for those whom I see like myself in a way: invisible trick mirrors everywhere. Doors to myself, opening everywhere. I only want to ask, why? Why? Can’t we change?

What is that keeps you from being the one to care? Not pity, not rescue...just be the one to care.

So what if we have glasses or twisted feet or crutches? Why is that a threat to your superior sense of normal? So what if we want to sit alone and don’t know how to come off as friendly? Does that make us prisoners?

Please, just speak to us. We’re crying, and the world is not becoming a better place.

Please, walk over to us. Be the one to care.