By Amanda Wicks
Lady Gaga sat down with the Dalai Lama on Sunday (June 26) at the United States Conference for Mayors. She participated in a session on kindness, where she advocated for local governments to practice that action more than they may have in the past.
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“The really fantastic thing about kindness is that it’s free,” she said as part of her opening remarks. “It’s the best resource that we have because you can give and give and receive kindness, and the well of it inside of you will never dry up, and it can’t hurt you or anybody else. It’s the thing that brings us all together.”
In order to emphasize how important kindness is nowadays, she went on to discuss the disconnect that exists between the government and the people, as well as how imperative it is to begin restructuring the ways in which those two systems communicate with one another. Gaga said, “The solution is that we need to build a kinder and braver world.”
She added, “I just wanted to say, in times of chaos and crisis what we all tend to do, right, is start pointing fingers at where we think the bad guys are, where the evil is, we all start arguing. Everybody has different opinions about that. Please do not forget that hatred or evil is intelligent, it’s smart and it’s invisible. It doesn’t have a color, it doesn’t have a race, it doesn’t have a religion. It has no politics.”
Gaga said evil’s main tactic is to divide the world into smaller groups that fight with each other so that it can more easily accomplish its goal. As a result, she advocated getting rid of labels like “gay, straight, rich, poor, mentally ill, not mentally ill, gun owner, not gun owner” because such labels become divisive. She said, “We are unified in our humanity” and kindness became a way to practice that humanity.
You can watch the full video below.
