Of Being A Good Person

I am a good person. I believe I am a or at least I like to labour under the delusion that I am a good person. The thing about being a good person is that it’s easy to be one, if you don’t actually have to do anything or when it doesn’t cost you anything. One can conveniently walk around being good without having to prove it except in a hypothetical morality quiz.

•If a loved one needed a kidney would you give it?

If a loved one needed a kidney, I would gladly give it, you don’t even really need two anyway and can live healthily to ripe old age with just the one. Hypothetically speaking, the decision to donate a kidney would be a no-brainer.

But in the real-life situation where a loved one needed a kidney hmmmm … I would eventually give them my kidney but not without going through some internal debate where I even thought of migrating to another planet and praying for a miracle or that I wasn’t a match; even a case of misdiagnosis.

•If you had all the money in the world…

If I had all the money in the world, I would give it away using a sophisticated algorithm to make sure it supported worthy causes and no one was left lacking….. We, I mean I, I like to act like money wont change me, if I had a little money, I would be the same old B. But being truthful about it, hmmm a bit of money and maybe I will start showing you the eccentricities only the filthy rich can get away with.

It is only human to give yourself the larger portion of the cake when you are sharing it out….

— ~B 🇿🇼 (@Beatonm5) April 25, 2021

 This explains why the global wealth distribution is the way it is… individuals worth more than $1 million constitute just 1.1% of the world’s population, yet they hold 45.8% of global wealth.

•Do you ever do bad things?

…..erm, no, not as a rule. Don’t do bad, isn’t that one of the commandments or at least it summarises all of them. On a primal level, the are urges I have to stop myself from doing; like pulling the wings of flying insects and pretending they are sheep and I am their shepherd, herding them about, pulling legs off insects and throwing them on a spider’s web, filling up a water pistol with salt solution and shooting at snails on the wall and watching them fall…. In my defence I was young and still growing, I am older and wiser now.

But the fact that my natural impulses are towards horribleness and I have to constantly dampen down murderous thoughts or at least channel them into writing, makes me question my…. goodness. Don’t laugh, you are probably alive right now because hiring assassins is illegal plus it’s very very very expensive and I am living lavida brocka. Would that mean the world is better for it in my not having all the money in the world?

I don’t just want to be a good person, but I want to want to be a good person and not simply because its what’s expected of me or the threat of eternal damnation for my immortal soul. I don’t want to think about how if we didn’t have the police, religion and ubuntu I might probably act vastly different and not for the better…

This also makes me ask myself, if there aren’t other things about myself, that I don’t want to question, lest the fabric of my identity unravel as it turns out I am not who I pretend to be nor who I even think I am…

•Are you a good person?

I like to think I am a good person and don’t want to think that I would be anything but a good person. I will walk on the razor edge of the straight and narrow pretending I never want to depart from the path and walk on the cool refreshing grass beside the path.

~B

Its Sunday morning the sun is blazing hot and the heat has me contemplating if the rapture has already happened, all the good ones are gone and we are the ones who got left behind… and this *gesturing expansively at the hot dry vastness* …is H E Double Hockey Sticks

The sign of a good person,
is that you are willing to do better…

— ~B 🇿🇼 (@Beatonm5) October 15, 2021