How much time would it take from your day to do one good thing? Nothing big or involved, just something good. For example, you see a piece of trash in a parking lot. How much time from your day would it take to pick it up and put it in a trashcan? No time at all, you were walking toward the door anyway weren't you?
How about randomly putting a shopping cart that is loose in the parking lot into the corral? That could take maybe two minutes tops. There you've done something small that will help someone out. They didn't ask you to, you just did it because it was the right thing to do.
How much better do you think your community would be if people took the time to do one good thing each day? A random good deed here, an act of unsolicited kindness there. We are not too busy to do these things. Just do it because you know it's the right thing to do.
I agree with the spirit of daily goodness, but although it's simple to get started being a better person, I think doing good requires looking at the end result and not just the intentions or immediate effects.
ReplyDeleteLet's take your examples:
Shopping Cart --
Someone gets paid to round these up. If enough people take your advice, jobs goes away (even if no person is employed doing just this full time). The salary is built into the grocery prices, so you would be saving all shoppers a fraction of a cent, but that redistributes money from a low-income employee to all consumers, whose average income is much higher.
Picking up Trash --
I do this sometimes, but like the shopping cart it's hard to know the end impact. If enough people take your advice, does it make the world cleaner or does it encourage the litterers to litter, knowing that it will get taken care of soon by a "do-gooder"? I'd rather see harsh fines for littering. The cops wouldn't have to catch anywhere near every instance -- after a short time people would think twice about littering. Plus, the revenue would pay for cops to walk around, which has other benefits. The revenue could also theoretically reduce taxes, which is good for everyone.
So how can you do real good in small doses? I think it mostly has to be social good. Kindnesses that people experience in the presence of the doer affect them more powerfully than anonymous benefits, and even if the social good deed has a questionable ultimate economic good, as in the examples above, the social positive creates more good actions.