About Goodness...

Goodness never seeks revenge. But goodness will not sit there and take it either. For to do so is to be bad to yourself. It is to allow others to lie to you, lie for you, to make you lie to yourself.

It's normal to talk about the world, whether good or bad. And what is the human world? The people in it. It sucks to say mean things about people. It sucks to see bad things in others because a warmly naive writer wants to believe in the goodness of people. And I do. But it's discouraging when that goodness is selective or is based on convenience. Convenient goodness champions the needs of children; but then it forgets the needs of children with disabilities, with psychological problems, in abusive homes, in poverty. What's left?

Sometimes I see how badly people treat one another. They fill their shot glasses with bad mood and set their pocket watches to the ticking of their own hot tempers, waiting to alarm and then they snap. They talk to their mothers and sons and daughters-in- law like garbage. And then in the wearing off of the bitch high, they suddenly turn to do some kind of good. First, they kick their own kids out in the street; but then they shower the obvious pain of the sick old man sitting on the corner of McMurdo's Lane with canned spaghetti, underwear and hugs. This is a lovely thing. But what about the not-so-obvious pain? Children raised in poverty are some of the most in-need soldiers of the gutter around though so few see them. They're shut in welfare bedrooms wanting nothing but a place to go and a friend to go there with. They're shut inside, stinking inside, in need of self esteem, in need of a breath of clean outdoor air, in need of the warm light of day. Often hungry, often cold, and always homeless even when they have a home. Convenient goodness is only good when it is convenient, of course. Therefore, Convenient good-doers hate all of the rest of the world that tries to love them and they make a mockery of their own goodness. Touchy and complex. They help the kids in the street forgetting that it is they who put them there.

So how do I write about goodness? What do I believe? I cannot take convenient good seriously. Such bad good behaviour makes the badness in goodness talk. I feel bad for needing to talk. Though it's human nature to talk about people. If we didn't talk about people in some capacity there would be very little to talk about. It is the actions and words of people - good, bad, and all the time, everywhere - that gives us something to talk about, to write about, to laugh and cry and love and hate the world about. If we didn't talk about people we wouldn't be human. What else would we talk about? Every good and  bad thing we see and hear, and every good and bad thing that sees and hears us, is somehow directly or indirectly related to the firm relationships and loose bonds we form with other people. It's the way they treat us, talk to us, make us feel good or bad. It's the cashier carelessly ripping you off at the supermarket, the bank teller refusing to cash a cheque, or the crooked bus driver.

That's our world. The people world. We rarely talk about the animal or plant worlds: the rabies the Ethiopian Wolf suffers, the lice the salmon on the fish farm catch. Unless it directly effects us: a mouse in the cupboard, a bug in a bed, pigeon shit on the car. Or what about little red riding hood, or more precisely baboon gangs? They run wild in South African suburbs; sitting in their chairs, eating their porridge, sleeping in their beds. Big monkeys show what happens when our world, the people world, goes to their world, the animal world. In the fairy tale of reality though, all we see and hear comes from our world. The observation of and interaction with other people with which we live. Does anyone ever notice the spider spinning in the hedge, or care about the ghost moth glowing in the fog, or want to talk about the honeysuckle springing up in the field?  No, not unless it's their hedge, their fog, their field. Their world.

Scoping out the goodness in others has long been my will. I know in my heart it is my will to do good though often it was not seen as such. To seek good is good. To not find good is not not good. I believe this principle also applies to others, like it would. We are all people and we all do and say things which are not taken in the manner we wish them to be taken. Once upon a time, I believed in the goodness of people. But then I met assumption, judgement, and opinion. I met the almighty soul-destroyer: the lie. My belief in the goodness of humanity was shattered. Shattered by rumours. And to regain my trust in people would require a complete tabula rasa of grave psychological proportion. The insecure teenager they hated just for being alone, just for being an insecure teenager; the small woman they doubted could do anything, know anything, just for being small, just for being a woman; and the poor child with no self-esteem they believed was lazy and crazy and stupid. She didn't have a brain simply because she wasn't raised with the birthday parties at McDonald's and regular pleasure trips to K-Mart. That's bound to give you brains, I'm sure.

And of course, she believed them. Sensitivity believes everything she is told. When they told her she was ugly, she believed it. When they told her she was stupid, she believed it. When they told her she was crazy, she believed it. This makes the truth even more difficult to find. It's one thing to hear a lie; it's another to believe it and to accept someone else's lie as your truth. But if all truth could imagine, and if all imagination that guards the spirit of truth could let its guards down, then scary graveyards such as the past need not keep the ancient sea monsters. Writing shall free them. They shall live.

She believed them. You believed them. I believed them. They influence us without inspiring us. We believed them though we needn't need to. I believed them though I wanted to not want to. Festered souls believe maggot mouths. They were sexist, ageist maggots on my soul who festered me whenever they opened their mouths. They believed I couldn't do anything. I didn't know anything because I was an insecure teenager and a small woman.  Funny how those who claimed to have such integrity would say such things about a kid they didn't even know.

I could never do anything good for the world because I didn't have what it takes. It takes money to feed the unfed and house the unhoused. And it takes a big mouth to make money. And somehow a big mouth doesn't seem like the highest good to me, but you need one to get a lot of good things done.  It really does suck to be so shy and so poor, for fulfilling the ideals of the mainstream good becomes impossible. But I can fulfill my own good: love others with my mind. And my mind is in my writing, so I love others with my writing. Even writing stuff about goodness helps. So I've been searching for what is good for many years and ensuring that goodness is a pure part of my soul, not an impulsive temporary act of mainstream obligatory good. Good becomes desperate for attention, for the glory, for the fame.

I dream of teaching art and poetry classes to children with disabilities, but I'm too shy. My shyness is a life sentence; it prevents me from doing things, many good things. It kills my soul. It keeps me on the outside. It keeps me alone. So it is a reason for people to hate me. I wish I had more strength sometimes. It is my dream to care for teenagers who are abused, exploited made fun of, bullied both physically and emotionally - young ones with psychological problems. But shyness impedes a lot of the good things I dream of doing. Does that mean my shyness is bad? Does that mean I am a bad person because I am shy? Writing helps to bring out the goodness in me. In this aggressive world, visions of good are the truest visions of beauty.

My little brother is a young one with psychological problems. Even as an adult who has been through that, it's still not easy getting through to him. Sometimes I don't feel it's my right or my business. He's going through a lot of the same self-doubts that I went through, feelings of social isolation and emotional/intellectual desperation. I cannot dismiss him for being "foolish". I needed someone to tell me that I was not ugly, I was not stupid, I was not crazy. I was not a terrible person. I shut myself in my bedroom and cried a lot; I looked in mirrors too much and too little just like many teenagers, but I was not crazy. I acted out when I needed to be understood and felt helpless when I wanted things to change. But I was always very quiet and the search for the goodness within me kept me quiet.

I want to get involved with things that really mean something to me, not out of obligation. The goodness has to come from within me not from without me. For the glory: that's one of the worst reasons to do something nice.

The search for goodness and soul continues…

Elaine 06