Oh, just everything.
This lawn sign message (and it’s on bumper-stickers too) was referenced in a sympathetic blog post about the ridicule being heaped onto Kristi Noem’s cross-dressing husband Byron. I will write about poor Byron later, if I can work up some enthusiasm for the job. Right now I’ll focus on the fatuous message above.
Kindness is not “everything.” It’s not even close to everything. Anyone who publicly declares such nonsense is either stating something they don’t believe in order to be nice (or seem nice), shamelessly virtue-signaling, or is too stupid to trust with sharp objects. Ethical living, thinking, inter-personal relations and problem-solving requires an acknowledgement of all the ethical values and virtues and a carefully learned and practiced system of balancing them.
Consider the Six Pillars of Character. None of those virtues designated by the Josephson Institute of Ethics are “everything,” and many, though legitimately important ethical consideration in the right context, have proven to be catastrophic when societies consider them to be “everything.” Perhaps the most blazing example is loyalty. Loyalty was the engine of the Third Reich. Even honesty isn’t “everything”; there are situations in which honesty is disastrous.
I find it significant that kindness didn’t even make the cut when the Josephson folks were compiling their “pillars” and the components of each. It could easily be included in the “Caring” pillar, which isn’t #5 in the hierarchy by accident.
“Kindness” is a favorite obsession in the Age of the Great Stupid. Kindness rationalizes open borders, “restorative justice,” and, naturally, “diversity, equity and inclusion.” It also undergirds irresponsible socialism, the destruction of personal responsibility and accountability, and the forgiveness of conduct that should not be forgiven or forgotten. Kindness was exploited to allow Joe Biden to be a zombie President.
No, kindness isn’t everything, or even the most important thing. I recommend caution and suspicion toward anyone who extols kindness to the exclusion of the other ethical values. The Ethics Alarms “Brel” designation comes to mind, awarded to those who embody the French troubadour’s memorable quote, “If you leave it up to them, they’ll crochet the world the color of goose shit.”
Ethics Alarms 
“Anyone who publicly declares such nonsense is either stating something they don’t believe in order to be nice (or seem nice)”
““Kindness” is a favorite obsession in the Age of the Great Stupid. Kindness rationalizes open borders, “restorative justice,” and, naturally, “diversity, equity and inclusion.” It also undergirds irresponsible socialism, the destruction of personal responsibility and accountability, and the forgiveness of conduct that should not be forgiven or forgotten. Kindness was exploited to allow Joe Biden to be a zombie President.”
I think “being kind” is extremely important. But we have to be clear what we mean when we say “be kind”. I think language when used in short pithy phrases is a kind of motte and bailey rhetorical device that allows way too much slippage.
Being Kind is extremely important. But Kindness is an active choice that demands recognizing there are times when you cannot and must not be “kind”. When I hear someone extoling their child to be “nice” to others I cringe because “being nice” is really just being passive and letting people walk all over you. But “be kind” is more active. It is what civically minded people do on behalf of others. But, since it is active, it also has agency to decide when and where, as needed, to stop being kind or when kindness actually demands something unpleasant.
But the pithy statement “kindness is everything” clearly invokes the “niceness” trap.
This verbal slippage occurs in other ways to:
When people say you should be “peaceful”, often they really want you to be harmless and allow them to get their way. But you CANNOT be peaceful, if at first you are not capable of violence, otherwise, you indeed are not peaceful, you are just harmless. A peaceful person both knows and is capable of acting on the times when violence is necessary to reestablish a proper peace.
“God is Love”; “All you need is Love”; etc. All pithy phrases meant to stop YOU from thinking critically about what the person is demanding of you when they say you need to just “love”. But alas – sometimes the loving thing to do is to let people know some unpleasant things about themselves.
I love the observation about, “If you are not capable of violence, you are not peaceful; you’re harmless.” That one has resonated with me for a few years now.
And to add a little onto the “all you need is love” observation that you made, I would point at Hebrews 12, where the author states, “My son, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord or lose heart when reproved by him, for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines…For what son is there whom a father does not discipline? If you are without discipline…you are not sons but bastards.” Somewhere along the way, we’ve started to lose the idea that if parents love their children, they will discipline them, and that discipline, even if painful, is important and yields the peace of self-control. It is not a kindness to a child to withhold discipline in order to be nice, and leave the child unable to cope with the world as an adult.
Truth
Yes, it’s classic lefty passive aggressive stuff. “Be kind” so I can take advantage of you.
There’s also a plaque psoriasis television commercial whose tag line is “Nothing is everything.” I think whoever is pushing this lawn sign/bumper sticker is following up on that commercial where everyone is happy and wonderful.
The goal is as always- getting their way. They don’t actually care about your moral framework but they will one hundred percent skew your morality as much as they can against you.
This is just so much Madison Avenue-style branding. Context is important. As Michael pointed out above, there’s nothing wrong with kindness. We should be kind. But “Kindness is Everything” is another one of those phrases where the words used together promote some insidious program of rationalizing wrongdoing and shirking accountability.
Now there’s a well drafted and succinct summary of the situation.
Even St. Paul did not rate kindness as the be all and end all of human relationships. He lists it has merely one aspect of love for one another when he says:
If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.