Are You Doing Great Good or Great Evil?

“We are all capable of both great good and great evil; it is our choices that define us.”

 - Connie Willis, Doomsday Book

I have talked about the Doomsday Book many times over the years.  I read it a few years before the SARS outbreak in Toronto in 2002, so maybe around 1999-2000. This book is set in the future where time travel is used in universities under careful restrictions to do historical research.  Great care is taken to do this without affecting the course of history. As the story progresses we realize it is also a time where the threat of pandemics is very real.  

I mention this because when SARS hit I was shocked as the echoes from what I read in this book. However that threat passed quickly. When. COVID hit, it did not.  It brought two to three years of controversy, medical mandates, protests, and division that I feel partially set the stage for what we are seeing today.  Looking back I can see many things that should have been handled differently.  Fear was in the driver's seat and it led people to turn on each other, sometimes by disconnecting and sometimes by attacking. I chose to get vaccinated and found myself having to block people sending me abusive DM's.  I know those who chose not to vaccinate or were damaged by the vaccine faced far worse. 

It has been several years since COVID first appeared, but I still find people divided into us versus them camps as if there is only one way to think, one news source that is accurate, one religion.  If you don't agree, then you haven't done the research, you aren't accessing the right news sources, or you are too stupid to understand (yes I had that said to me recently during what my attempt to have a respectful conversation with someone on our opposing views). 

The one thing I learned during my over 18 years of interviews with a wide variety of people is that we will never all think the same.  This is because of humanity's amazing diversity and diversity is actually our greatest asset. It allows us to rethink, to adapt and to make new discoveries.  The challenge is we tend to feel uncomfortable with living around others who do not share our views. The situation in the US right now is the perfect example.

Democracy is there to bring people together in a way that is respectful of everyone's rights to their own beliefs on how to live their lives and what religion they choose to worship.  What it was never meant to do was to subjugate a people or turn them into scapegoats. Those who crave power love to use scapegoats as a distraction to what they are doing behind the scenes. Hitler chose the Jews. In North America it has been the indigenous people, slaves, minorities, and immigrants.  Today the current administration has chosen the LGBTQ community, especially trans people.  It is shameful. 

We are all capable of great good and great evil.  As the quote above says, it is our choices that will determine whether we do one or the other.  Our personal beliefs are worthy of respect. What they do not allow is for us make laws that take away or limit the personal choices of others. If we want others to treat us and our beliefs with respect, then we must treat other and their beliefs with the same respect.  

We all should have full rights over the choices we make about our bodies, the beliefs we embrace, the person we love, how we define family and the freedom to share our thoughts publicly.  When people decide having the biggest, loudest voice, and strongest bully to lead them gives them the right to be dictators, stomping on the personal freedoms of others and creating a legacy of hate, then democracy crumbles. Humanity will not survive in a petri dish of hate. No one wins.  

Today it is time to decide. Every moment you are making decisions to either do great good or of great evil.  Don't try to justify being racist or homophobic or condone the bullying of others. Let go of fear and choose instead to be a unifying voice creating community and good will.