"Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth." - Muhammed Ali
What does it mean to be good? As children, we often saw the world as very black and white. In our eyes, there were good people and bad people, heroes and villians, protagonists and antagonists. If a girl was mean in preschool, if a young boy was being handcuffed outside of a market, they were automatically bad in my mind. There was a way to act and a way not to act, and that was it. Too often, I would place a snap judgement on someone based on what I saw or heard. People were automatically categorized as someone to be respected or someone to be ridiculed. Then, I did as we we all do, I began to see the world as it truly is, I began to see that it was not black and white, not good and bad, there were not heros and villians, that in fact there was a whole lot of gray. I learned the girl who was mean to me in preschool had parents who were going through a divorce at the time, and the boy being handcuffed outside of the market was stealing food for his family because they had no money. I learned being good is both the easiest and the hardest task in the world, that being nice and sweet to people did not always mean you are being good. I learned that life makes our moral compass go wacky every now and then. This was a very confusing concept for me to understand, and it redefined what goodness meant to me. It wasn’t as simple as I thought it was. In light of where we currently are as a country, we need to take a step back and ask ourselves what being a good person is and how we can act in reflection of that. Because it is not as simple as it sounds, we need to choose to act as people of dignity. The first step to acting with goodness is understanding goodness.
“No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite. Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished.” - Nelson Mandela. Man’s goodness is a flame that can be hidden but never extinguished. It is so important to understand this. To understand that we each have good and evil in us, and we have a choice every day what side we are going to bring out into the world. These days with social media, hate and pride spread like wildfire. People want to keep up this persona of being tough and get defensive when their ideas are challenged because they are not like their own. This type of behavior and mentailty exists everywhere from our homes, to social media, all the way to our government.
We have grown so immune to thinking we are right all the time, that sometimes we forget there are a million other perspectives to understand, and maybe we are wrong. Being a good person is putting away our pride and ego and acting with genuine truth. Being a good person is understanding that your ideas are not the only ones in this world, and that those opposing ideas may give you a new, intelligent way of thinking, that maybe they actually reflect similar values. It is understanding there is evil in the world, and that being good does not necessarily mean being nice.It is understanding that Nazi soldiers had families and kissed their wives goodnight, and how absolutely scary that is. It is understanding opportunity as both a privilege and something to be worked for, that people with a different religion, race, gender, paycheck, or family are apart of the human race and deserve to be treated as such. It is standing up for the right thing always, and with dignity, even if it isn’t easy.
I truly believe that being good is love. Not romantic love or naive love, but the kind of love that we all can have for one another. The love that reminds us how we all have a story, and you never know what that story may be. The kind of love that allows us to wake up in the morning and know the world is worth living and fighting for. So choose to be a good person. Choose to love not because it is easy, but because it is hard. Choose goodness even though people may punish you for it. Choose to be good because it is not as simple as we once thought, because the world is undeniably gray, and because this life is just too short and fragile not to.
Charlie Chaplin says it best in The Great Dictator.
