Random Acts of Kindness

Billy travels once again to the future in Chapter 5, this time to 1948, when he is admitted to a hospital due to the fact that doctors believe he is going crazy. His hospital companion was Eliot Rosewater, a man, who, like Billy, loved reading science fiction. Whenever Billy´s mother would come to visit Rosewater would be extremely polite and attentive, for he "thought that might make the world a slightly more pleasant place to live in" (pg. 102). Rosewater´s actions reminded me of the novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde Pay it Forward. This book, later adapted into a movie, tells the story of little Trevor McKinney, a boy who decides that the way to change the world is by small, random acts of kindness. In fact, he proposes that every person has to do exactly three favors, one for three different persons, without an agenda or hidden desires. In turn, those three persons have to do three favors each, making the number of favors exponential. Trevor´s hopes were that every person on the planet recieved and made favors until it was just a plain habit. Truthfully the plan was not all that bad, if only everyone had the same desire of helping others and believed in returning what they recieved. We should all learn from this little kid or this "crazy man", and maybe our world will be a better place to live in.