Kindness in Folk Tales A common theme in folk tales is the younger brother or sister who is kind to the needy fish, or old woman, or bird and thus is rewarded, while the selfish older brother or sister is punished for being mean. The moral of such stories is that kindness pays. Today, you would think that hardly anyone had read those old stories. When I told my husband I was writing a column about kindness, he said, “You should call it, ‘Kindness is Dead.’” He was referring, of course, to the loud and angry voices of extremists so prevalent in the United States and around the world. These…