In The Face Of Trump, These Graphic Designers Are Taking A Stand For Empathy

Last night, Donald Trump moved ever closer to clinching the Republican presidential nomination. What was once a joke is looking more and more like an eventuality. But as Trump’s loose-cannon, casually xenophobic rhetoric continues to inspire vitriolic responses from both his supporters and opponents, a pair of graphic designers from New York have chosen to respond with a message of love.

Timothy Goodman and Jessica Walsh, known previously for their “40 Days of Dating” project, organized a group of people to stand in front of Trump Tower in New York yesterday, holding up large letters that read, “Build Kindness Not Walls.” The wall, of course, is a reference to Trump’s crazy promise to erect a barrier between the United States and Mexico and somehow force Mexico pay for it.

Goodman and Walsh supplemented their display with a blog post on a website they set up to promote it:

Excluding people breeds discrimination, hate, and sometimes, terrorism. History tells us that building walls, both physically (like Trump’s proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border) and metaphorically (like his claims of banning all Muslims from the U.S.), will only cause more problems. We simply cannot shut out people based on religion, ethnicity, race, gender, or sex. Instead of building walls and creating fear, we need to build more kindness and love. Kindness is an innate quality that we all possess as humans. We need a leader who will be an example of this trait. Let’s stand up to this intolerance. Let’s not let walls tear us down.

On the whole, the “Build Kindness Not Walls” demonstration is part of a larger project called “12 Kinds of Kindness,” in which Goodman and Walsh attempt to discover ways to build empathy. The 12th kind is their response to Trump, which in addition to the display outside Trump Tower includes a Trump insult soundboard and a poll asking what you’ll do if Trump wins.