On Being Ashamed of the Good in Us

I'm a good person. So are you. Why can't we admit it?

Photo by Vladyslav Vorona on Unsplash

I’m a good person. I’m not a great person and I’m certainly not a perfect person, but as citizens go, I’m good in the sense that I don’t set out to deliberately hurt other people. Right now other people are hurting far worse than I have ever been and I can’t get them out of my mind. I don’t know what it is to hurt that much, to be afraid every single day, to wonder what fresh hell tomorrow will bring, to question my very safety in a culture that is supposed to work at protecting me—a culture that promises to protect me. I don’t worry at all about my very existence, other than the possibility of dying before I’m done here. I’m safe and it gives me the luxury to care about those other people who aren’t.

The people I care about are good people, too. They don’t deserve what’s happening to them, and it sickens me that I know their stories and I can’t do much of anything to help them. It sickens me even more that our community of good people, working hard to right these wrongs, are under constant bombardment for being good.

The propaganda-meisters on the Right want their cult to believe that being good is bad for them. They want them to believe there’s no such thing as being good. That every person showing signs of being good is faking it, that they have an ulterior motive, that they are every bit as bad as they are. In fact, worse.

And the good people who know better—people like you and me—bite our tongues because we’re not supposed to point out that the goodness we try to do, sometimes every day, makes us good people. God forbid we should say it out loud. We know we’ll be in for endless challenges: How good are we? Give them examples. Prove that we’re as good or better than anyone else. And because we won’t, because we can’t, because that’s not our purpose or our goal, we have to sit back and watch as our good people, those who do speak out, get mauled for trying to do what’s right.

Jason Watson, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Colin Kaepernick

I’ve simplified it here, but I don’t feel the need to go into detail about what makes us good and what makes them bad. We talk about it every hour of every day. We know the details. We’re acutely aware of who the bad guys are. We can name names. We can describe their dirty tricks, their atrocities, their attempts to flout our laws and our constitution, their uncanny ability to get away with it all and to make tons of money off of it in the process. But we haven’t yet figured out how to stop them.

If we’re the good guys how is it we haven’t been able to stop them? And there’s where our massive inferiority complexes kick in. By all rights we should have prevailed. Donald Trump should never have been president again. And because we, the good people, couldn’t stop him, he has become a rampaging bully, out to hurt us in every way he can just to prove he can.

He wants us to be afraid. He thrives on our confusion and our fear. He is the head of a regime determined to take away our rights and our protections and force us to live as their serfs, their unquestioning subjects. They’re out to conquer us, to make us work to make them richer and more powerful, and we question our goodness because as much as we feel it, as much as we want to respect who we are, celebrating our goodness and working toward it hasn’t helped us.

I am one insignificant person. I have no presence beyond what I do here and at the local level when I can. But we good people are a force when we get together and believe in ourselves. We’ve shown who we are in nationwide protests and marches, in varying forms of resistance, including exposing the regime tactics by using our hand-held cameras to force the truth, by telling our stories no matter how painful they are, by spreading the word through online sources, and by insisting, often stubbornly, that the law is on our side.

We have not moved to actual rebellion. We still don’t believe we’re good enough or strong enough for that.

The problem with what we do is that we don’t do it consistently. We wait for an incident and then we act. It makes an impact for a while, but then it’s nearly forgotten because we don’t add it to the long list of actions we must address every single day if we’re going to have any appreciable difference.

We can’t make a dent if all we do is point out the problems we need to address. We need to stress that it’s the good guys who will get the job done, and we’re it. We need to include our leaders who are also good guys, but in the end our very goodness will require us to become warriors. We can’t be afraid of words like ‘battle’ and ‘fight’ and ‘army’. We’re not out to kill, we’re out to destroy. That takes legions of us and we have to get ready to get in their way.

Part of our frustration is that we can’t quite convince ourselves that the takedown of our enemy in our midst, that scary enemy, requires more than what we’ve been doing. They need to fear us and they don’t. There are signs that they’re nervous about the upcoming midterm elections, but they’re already telegraphing that they’re going to do everything they can to make sure the election is fixed in their favor. We’re not sure they can’t do it.

Their power grows beyond anything we’ve ever seen before. They own the presidency, the Congress, and the Supreme Court. Our entire government is being held captive by them. We can’t allow that. We, the good guys, have to get our good on and work to stop them. But first we have to appreciate who we are. We are the force this regime must learn to fear.

We’ve proven we can be stubborn, our presence can be relentless, our mission can be on-going, and now we need to believe we are the people our country has been waiting for. The Trump regime is pure evil, and in all of history evil has only been temporary. The good in us has seen to that. Now is our time. We simply have to own it. We can start by celebrating the goodness that gives us strength. We don’t have to qualify it. We don’t have to justify it. Living up to it is good enough.

---

I’m here for the long haul and everything I include here is without paywalls or exclusions because it’s important enough to me to want to share it with you. If any of this resonates, please add your comments. You can help by passing this on and by poking that little heart button, or you can help to support my work by becoming a paid subscriber ($5/month or $50/year). If you don’t want to commit to that kind of relationship, you can tip any amount at any time at Ko-Fi or at Paypal. Thank you!

If you would prefer to remain on the free list, I only ask that you share any of my pieces with those who might want to join our community. It all helps.

---