Doing Good
Aug 28th, 2005 at 1:36 pm by Susie
Sigh. It’s very hard to do good works and see no results. But every great spiritual teacher says the same thing - it isn’t the results, but the very act of your good works that tilts the world’s balance of good and evil:
What she dealt with daily goes beyond the pale…beyond the nightmares of most people; Children with all four limbs hacked off right above the knee or below the elbow. Twelve year olds who died in childbirth after being gang-raped by the Janjaweed. Women who gave birth to rape-babies who were then cast out by their families for shaming the family name, leaving only one avenue of survival for themselves and their children after the camps: Prostitution.
What is fucking her up is the desperation, and the fact that she worked herself to death for over a month, and she still didn’t really save anyone. Now that she’s gone, it’s like she was never there. Even the ones she helped keep alive, she didn’t save. You try dealing with that reality.
This caught my eye because I’ve been plowing through Philip Caputo’s “Acts of Faith,” which is about this very thing - aid workers in the Sudan, the ultimate futility of their work, and the impossibility of figuring out just who are the good guys:
“He lacks a moral imagination when it comes to himself. He’s so certain of his inner virtue that he believes anything he does, even something . . . terrible, is the right thing. Am I making myself clear? The man cannot imagine himself doing anything wrong. It’s a blindness. He can’t see his own demons because he doesn’t think they exist, and so he’s fallen prey to them.”
I’m only half-way through, but it’s a good, enlightening read.
If you’re kind to someone, it increases the odds that they will in turn be kind to others. Studies show this. Therefore, the good that you do propagates in the world. And conversely.
And this might be a good time to remember that nursing home workers labor for years and nobody gets better. I just went to the fair with the nursing home and the lady I sat next to on the bus nearly drove me crazy- and I’m a trained professional. The people who work on the floors deal with this eight hours a day forever.
We can’t pay them enough, but we could pay them more.