Don’t worry, be happy

OK, let’s huddle. guys. If you want you can take a knee.

By my count, this is the 100th day of our collective semi-voluntary house arrest, and I can understand if you’re feeling a little antsy. I know I am.

I don’t mind working at home—I’ve always done a lot of work at home— but I miss going into the office to hang out and goof off. I miss the weak coffee. Even though I’m widely known as a “no talker” (has our society grown so young that we need to explain Seinfeld allusions?) I miss the burble of disparate voices in various registers and the general casino ambience of an open newsroom. I miss art gallery openings and street fairs and baseball games.

I miss not having to consider the consequences of my actions, of not having to weigh the risks versus the rewards of a trip to Kroger.

I’m tired of having to discipline myself not to shake hands or hug. I’m sick of all these strictures and precautions, and I don’t feel all that threatened by the virus. Maybe that’s hubris, but it is my authentic feeling.

Yet I am observing all the protocols. I put on a mask because it feels like common courtesy, the way I used to put on a T-shirt to cut the grass. I also understand that the majority of doctors and scientists think it may be useful that asymptomatic carriers of the virus wear masks, but mostly I wear one simply to signal to other people that I’m taking their anxiety seriously.

Even if my own anxiety about this virus is relatively low (and, whether it should be or not, it is), we’re all in this together. If my wearing a mask does nothing more than make some of my fellow humans feel a little better about the world, then that’s not nothing.

We ought to try to relieve each other’s anxiety. That’s what good people do, right?

But those people who don’t wear masks in grocery stores, most of them probably consider themselves good people too. They don’t see themselves as bad; they would probably tell you it’s their right not to cover the lower half of their face.

Some of them would get all huffy and Thomas Paine on you and try to valorize their position by talking about brainwashed sheeple and the importance of standing up to tyranny, but most of them are probably just a couple of degrees off my position. They don’t feel like it’s necessary. Maybe they’ve even read someplace that the masks don’t help or might make matters worse.

They can justify themselves to themselves, and find support for their justifications. Google around and you can find support for almost any position you want to take. There are even philosophies that exalt selfishness as a virtue.

Some people don’t believe they have a duty to anyone other than themselves. Some people view the world as a purely transactional realm. They don’t identify as bad people— almost no one does. (And those who do make my point: no idea is so weird that someone won’t sincerely adopt it.)

These are difficult times, but maybe not the worst we’ve ever seen. People are dying, but as some people like to remind us, people are always dying and in the long run, we’re all dead anyway, so what’s the big deal if the covid hustles a few hundred thousand into the void prematurely? If that’s what it takes to get college football sparked up and running, maybe we ought to be willing to make the sacrifice.

Astonishingly, the majority of the people who have whipped out this opinion identify as “pro-life.” As would a lot of the people noticing on social media that George Floyd hadn’t always been his best self. It takes a

particular kind of mind to wonder, after watching a pleading man being slowly choked to death for eight minutes and change on the Internet, what he might have been up to before the cameras started rolling.

Do you think those people are any damn good at all?

Let me answer that for you. They certainly don’t think they’re bad people. Because it’s not like they actually support the on-camera murder of alleged phony $20-bill passers; they just understand the world is a complicated place and that things like that will happen.

The police have difficult jobs and are likely to get irritated. The occasional George Floyd or Breonna Taylor or Botham Jean is just the cost of doing business. When you have, as Mike O’Meara, president of the New York Police Benevolent Association said the other day, 375 million interactions with the public every year, a few of them are going to go sideways.

So we should just shut up and give the police tanks. Stop treating the police like thugs and animals.

I’m all for that last part, though the drama queen delivery O’Meara used reminded me of the kid on the Internet pleading for us all to “leave Britney alone.”

Well, all right. There’s at least a chance O’Meara wasn’t performing, and that his cri de coeur is authentic. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt: All of you out there treating the police like thugs and animals, stop it right now. They are human beings. They love their mamas and their kids. Their job is probably harder and more stressful than yours.

And they aren’t as a rule bad people, though, like everybody else, they sometimes make mistakes and regrettable decisions.

Everybody can justify themselves to themselves, right? When you think about the worst things you’ve ever done, aren’t you at least tempted to rationalize them? Almost no one identifies as a bad person.

But we can all agree that there are bad people in the world. The other day Joe Biden said, “There are probably anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the people out there that are just not very good people.” That’s probably generous—there aren’t a whole lot of genuinely terrible people (though they do seem to be able to find each other). On the other hand, most of us aren’t as good as we might be.

But I don’t believe that there are any inherently bad people. It’s about all nurture, with just a very few of us suffering from some congenital flaw. Bad people are made, not born—you don’t get enough love and support as a kid, you’ve got a lot to overcome. Most bad people are miserable people first.

Plato thought being good had everything to do with being happy, that what we naturally desired was good for us and for the world. Aristotle said the same thing a little differently, that to be happy one had to be good.

To be genuinely good you have to ask hard questions of yourself, to interrogate your own intentions, to do the right things for the right reasons. If that sounds hard, fake it until you make it. Do better until you can be better.

That would make us all happier. pmartin@adgnewsroom.com

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