Bad people doing bad things? Good people doing good things? What do we need?

To say that there is a lot of disagreement in the world today, including in the US, is an understatement. We also hear folks, sometimes including me, saying that those who say (and, especially, do) reprehensible things are bad people. But many religions, and indeed most folks who are thoughtful, would note that there is a distinction between what people say or even do and who they are. One formulation is “hate the sin, love the sinner”. Certainly, the Jesus Christ of the New Testament is a prime example of that approach, loving and caring for thieves, prostitutes, and other people who did “bad” things. It is disappointing, to say the least, that a very high proportion of those who claim to follow his teachings cannot even follow his example in supporting and caring for those who are victimized: the poor, the sick, the migrant.

But I still think that there is a point where doing bad things makes one a bad person. If you do enough bad things, and they are bad enough, and you consistently keep doing them despite knowing that they are bad, I think you are a bad person. Redeemable, perhaps. But bad. On the other hand, what about people who do good things? Does that make them good people? Do they have to do some minimum number of good things, that are good enough, with enough consistency? Some folks – most folks – do both good things and bad things. If you believe in a religion in which there is a final reckoning, they will be judged. If, like me, you don’t, you can do your own judging. Except mostly it’s beside the point, since there is little we can do to change others. I can laud the good things that people do and condemn the bad. I can be happy that we live in a world where so many people do good things, and sad that we live in a world where so many do bad ones. One theory of child rearing is to praise good behavior and ignore bad, hoping that will extinguish as a result. It is a nice theory, one that can translate to both adults and dogs, but it may not always work. And sometimes the bad behavior of children can be so dangerous, to themselves or others, that it is very difficult (and probably wrong) to just ignore it; it needs to be corrected. Adults, of course, should know better than to stick a fork in an electric outlet, but don’t seem to always be able to not drive crazily or drunk, or wave a loaded weapon around people, or abuse family and friends physically, sexually, or mentally.

Or even to not actively work to oppose those who are doing good. Some of the best things that people do (which might contribute to making them the best people) are to go out of their way to work to help those who are the most disadvantaged. An example, in my community of Tucson, are those who go out into the hot (or at night, especially in winter, cold) and arid deserts, leaving water for migrants who are wandering in remote areas with no water, and are in danger of dying. Two groups in particular do such good work that they need to be named: No More Deaths/No Mas Muertes and Samaritans, and there are others. But there are people who do not think this is good work. They blame migrants for a variety of things, and don’t want them to come into the US. They want the government to stop them. They want to stop them themselves. They want to stop the people who help them by providing water in the desert. Some of them are now out roaming the desert with weapons, looking not only for migrants but for those who try to keep them from dying. One member of Samaritans talked about the fear: “They carry guns. We carry water.”

I can’t know what motivates someone to not only think that it is a mistake to bring water to the desert, where desperate people who cannot pass at legal checkpoints are brought and abandoned by human coyotes to survive or not, but to also wish to stop – even at gunpoint – those others who are trying to help. The names of those helping groups are meaningful; No More Deaths is explicit. Samaritans refers to the parable in the book of Luke where a man beaten and left by robbers in the road is quickly passed by the “responsible people” of the community (a priest and a Levite), but helped when a Samaritan, a people generally disliked by the Hebrews, stops for him. The folks currently using that name try to emulate this. I am not sure who those who oppose and threaten them are trying to emulate. A recent article discussed how some Republican legislators, not just in Arizona but across the US, are attacking agencies like Casa Alitas, a project of Catholic Charities in Tucson, which has for many years provided a very temporary landing place for migrants legally dropped off by the CBP (Border Patrol); a bed and food and clothes and perhaps a ride to the airport or bus terminal to get to their ultimate destination. One politician from another state talked about the “secret” locations where these people are served. They are not secret, but they now need more security to protect not only migrants but volunteers. Of course, they are usually in poor and remote sections of town, but if the politician in question would like to offer up a facility near his home, I’m sure that there are organizations that would be grateful. 

I am reading a book called “Cooked” by Carol Karels, who started first as a nursing student and then as a nurse at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in 1971. I also worked there, in the late ‘70s as resident, and then in the ‘80s and ‘90s, so it is of personal interest to me. One theme is the contrasting descriptions of it – huge, poor, under-resourced, decrepit, a “terrible place” according to a LOOK magazine article she quotes. It is also, however, a place where Chicago’s many poor and uninsured could – and can – go for care. The waits were long, the resources limited, but people in need were not turned away, and got the best care those who worked there could provide. Karels’ mother was a volunteer who collected donated clothing and other goods and spoke of the nurses and doctors who worked in the hospital as “saints”. I wouldn’t say that, especially having been one – although there were some who really probably were – but they, we, were committed to the idea that everyone deserved the best care we could provide. And it often became political; the year before I started the interns and residents went on strike. Not for more money (which the County government would have understood!) but for things like EKG machines – and grounded electric outlets that could take their plugs – and resuscitation equipment, and people to draw blood for lab tests. The residents called these working conditions, which of course they were. And 12 residents went to jail when the County told them to go back to work. But I digress. A little.

I tried to do work that was good, and that helped people. I didn’t want to be or expect to be a saint, whatever that is, but I also didn’t want to be someone whose marginal benefit to society was minimal. So maybe the work that other doctors and me, and Carol Karels and other nurses, and her mother and other volunteers, made a difference in the lives of people. And maybe, if we hadn’t been doing it, others would have. Or maybe not. It is usually easy to find someone to do better-paid, better-perked, better status work.  

Anyway, I leave it to you to decide what is good and what is bad and doing how much of either makes the person doing it good or bad. But I know one thing: We need a lot more people doing a lot more good.

When do people doing bad things become bad people?

On a recent Saturday morning, at 7:15am, a car driving down my road swerved across the sidewalk and took out part of the chain link fence in front of one house and most of the white picket fence of the next house. I saw it when I was walking the dogs not much later; the policewoman was just arriving on the scene, and the owners of the house were standing in their little front yard still agape. “It sounded like an explosion,” the woman said, and I’ll bet that it did. The front gate was across the street and down about 20 yards.

It wasn’t a tragic event; no one was killed or even hurt. Still, it was pretty scary looking. Not only will it be a big job to fix, it emphasized their vulnerability. It is a little house with a little front yard; the damage extended to within 6 feet of their front door, much less than the distance that the car was off the street where it should have been. “I imagine alcohol was involved,” I observed somewhat inanely to the policewoman, who responded “Yes, still from Friday night.” She was not much less inane, asking the homeowners if they had gotten the license number. If they were not in bed, they were having breakfast at the back of the house; the car didn’t stay around.

So this driver did a bad thing. It makes me want to say he (“he” because there is no gender-neutral pronoun, and it is epidemiologically more likely) was a bad person, but that is not necessarily true. Probably, given that it was early Saturday morning (or for some, very late Friday night!) alcohol was involved, but it didn’t have to be. He could have been texting while driving, and lost control on this curving road. That’s pretty common; in Kansas it is not even illegal (the texting-while-driving part, not the hit-and-run part), and done by many folks who would tut-tut and condemn drunken drivers. In either case the damage is the same. It could have been the first time anything like this happened to him, or he could be a regular offender. But how many times would he have to be irresponsible, drive drunk, cause property damage, kill someone, before he went from being someone who did bad things to being a bad person? I imagine that both philosophy and theology have much to say about this concept, but some of it must have to do with intentionality. I doubt that the driver was trying to take out the front yard of this house.

I have been thinking about the difference between committing bad acts and being a bad person lately, as a result of the discussions over whether to raise taxes on multi-millionaires and billionaires and huge businesses, on the financiers and bankers who caused the economic crisis and have been doing just fine, thank you, despite the destruction that they have caused. Their flacks, both in Congress and in the media (and now themselves) are angrily denouncing Occupy Wall Street demonstrators and other critics for criticizing them for being wealthy. Jamie Dimon, CEO of Chase, says “Acting like everyone who's been successful is bad and because you're rich you're bad, I don't understand it.” He is quoted by Edward Murray in The Huffington Post, “Nobody hates the rich…but everybody hates the bad”. Murray takes on this very issue, noting that there is no objection to people being rich, but answering a square “YES!” to the question that he puts in the mouth of these billionaires "Is it too much to ask that everyone just sit down and be nice while we destroy the middle class?" In a reference to the fictional Henry Potter, the rich villain in “It’s a Wonderful Life”, Murray concludes that “…the Potters of the world aren't bad because they're rich. They're not bad because they're successful. They're bad because... they're just simply bad.”

I fear – and expect that Edward Murray would agree – that this is oversimplistic, or, more important, decreases the responsibility these folks have for their anti-social, destructive, selfish, and evil behavior by implying that they couldn’t help it because they are “bad”. There is a history in literature of evil rich people, who sometimes transform (Ebenezer Scrooge) and sometimes don’t (Henry Potter). Sometimes they are not “people” but non-people who it is easier to hate, and sometimes they transform (the Grinch) and sometimes they don’t (Sauron from “Lord of the Rings”). The comic books have a long history of often-deformed (maybe this is why they are bad) villains who we cannot imagine as anything but evil (Batman’s Joker and Penguin and the whole retinue of Dick Tracy’s Flattop and BB Eyes and The Brow), and we use aliens when we want to create bad guys who are really the “other”. And Nazis are always useful. The folks Murray writes about are certainly rich, but they show an amazingly antagonistic, selfish, non-caring attitude toward the rest of us. They are not the redeemed-becausethey-have-some-social-values rich such as FDR or the Kennedys or even Warren Buffett or Bill Gates. They are greedy pigs. They do lots and lots of bad things.

They are not bad because they are wealthy. They have done a lot of bad, non-productive things to get their wealth, these financiers. Far from being “job creators” (the Republican use of that term does not make it a synonym for “rich”) they are job destroyers, life destroyers. They do not manufacture or create, they manipulate money and people’s lives. Those are really bad things. What makes them seem like, maybe be, bad people is intentionality. They created nothing but wealth for themselves at the expense of everyone else, and they knew what they were doing. To say they are bad because they are bad implies that, like Sauron, they have no choice. They did. They could have been good people, or OK people, or reasonable people. But they weren’t and aren’t.

We call the house where the white picket fence was knocked down “Smokey’s house” because that is the name of the dog that lives there, a dog that ran around inside the small yard and barked at our dogs when we walked past. It will be a while before Smokey can be let out in that yard again because there is no longer a fence. But I’m pretty sure that the person who hit it, drunk or texting, was, while irresponsible and displaying poor or no judgment, not planning to destroy it. The financiers were planning to do what they did and remain unapologetic.

We should hate them and we should punish them. Not because they are wealthy, and not because they are “bad”. We should hate them and punish them because they did very bad things that have seriously and maybe permanently damaged the economies of the world and the lives of the people in it.

And they did it on purpose.