tabular_rasa | Writer's Block: Goodness gracious

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If you're looking for it, you can see it all the time.

What is love and friendship but a manifestation of the capacity for human goodness? If you have ever loved or been loved, you have had a taste of one of the best parts of of being conscious. There are some who view their loved ones as strange anomalies in otherwise cruel world, but I blame that attitude on why they see nothing else because even strangers can be amazingly kind: the man who walks with you to the place you're going in a new city even though it's out of his way; the woman in line behind you who loans you quarter who you forget to thank because you're too embarrassed from holding up the line with digging through your wallet; the people who toss dollars into a beggar's cup anyway despite suspicions that he might just buy liquor or crack.

I am often a pessimist, but I am a pessimist about circumstances. I believe in bad luck and Murphy's Law. What can go wrong will go wrong. If too many good things happen to you, something bad has to follow. However, I am a strangely incurable optimist when it comes to people.

No matter how selfish, irrational, ignorant, insensitive, cruel, hateful, and destructive people can be, people never lose their capacity to be selfless, wise, understanding, tolerant, kind, loving, and productive. It's like my favorite quote, the rhetorical question from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables: "Is there not in every human soul a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world and immortal in the next, which can be developed by goodness, kindled, lit up, and made to radiate, and which evil can never entirely extinguish?" Their goodness can be pulled to the surface at any moment, often unexpectedly-- and it usually does. You may not be the one to see it, but sooner or later it pulls through.

People can be awful-- trust me, I don't need any more proof-- but despite it all I still trust them to come through more than I trust that circumstances will all work out in the end. I trust in seeing the wounded heal and the bitter love again more than I trust hurricanes, floods, fires, and famines not to break out precisely when we need them least, and I would bet on a hateful man learning to love before I would bet on a slot machine.

In fact, sometimes I wonder if human goodness does not exist precisely because we can't trust the world around us to work out perfectly. In a world of scarcity and suffering, in which life is short, pain abundant, and injustice rampant, our only consolation is each other.