Keeping cool, Avot-style

The theme of "Community Voices: Be Cool" by Rabbi Robert Kravitz, posted on City Sun Times, 22 March 2021, is not hard to guess. We live in what he describes as "panic mode."  He adds:

All around are internecine fights, arguments, challenges to authority, revolutions, overthrows, melting glaciers, wildland fires, demagogues and more. All heat, seldom light. ... When two sticks are scraped against one another rapidly, heat and even fire is produced. When two angry individuals argue violently, again heat erupts, and sometimes violence. Molten lava flows and destroys everything in its path. So too with words that emanate from enraged individuals. And speech, with all of today’s volatile verbiage, often yields violent actions.

After asking, "What is the possibility of cooling the temperature, of lowering the volatility, of calming the rage?", he states:

In the Talmud there is a section called Ethics of the Fathers, Pirke Avot in Hebrew. (Today, we would probably re-title it as Ethics of the Parents, or something similarly egalitarian.) In Avot we learn that anywhere where there is no one acting appropriately, it is our personal obligation to be the one to act appropriately, to do what is seemly [see below for reference to the mishnah and what it literally says]. Hence in this world of disorganization and turmoil, a planet melting from human violence and discord…we each have the obligation to cool it down, lower the heat, begin to rationally resolve the issues. Each of us has the personal opportunity — some would say the obligation — to be the one who makes the difference. To begin a process of reconciliation; to start to change the level of malevolence that is all around us.

To be the one who stands up and acts appropriately; to tie up the fraying ends of a world that is disintegrating; to be the individual who will promote facts and values that we as human beings must share. To finally commence ending the panic, dropping the temperature, and beginning to create light — not more heat — as we save ourselves and preserve our planet.

The mishnah in question is Avot 2:6, where Hillel teaches that, in a place where there are no men, one should strive to be a man. An alternative citation might have been the same Tanna's exhortation at Avot 1:12 to be like Aaron -- loving peace and pursuing it.