The Right Thing To Do

The problem of figuring out what is the ‘right thing to do’ has plagued me for a lifetime. I’ve searched for a magic book with all the answers. I didn’t find them in the Bible. A How-To book sometimes substitutes lack of ability to size up some situations but does not really give broad enough contexts for people in most situations. There is, in fact, nothing to compensate for good common sense, empathy, sensitivity, and integrity.

I was reminded of being scolded by a Priest in a Greek Orthodox Church twenty-one years ago as being disrespectful in the House of God for laughing at something someone said while waiting for my mother’s funeral to begin, as people were still filing into the church. That my body could come up with a laugh was for me a very healing thing at the time. At the time, I wondered whether God might have respected my manner of grief more than this unfeeling Priest, who cared nothing for me but only followed his Babbited brainwash.

The ‘right thing to do’ has been claimed often as a reason for doing things. George W. Bush used it when it later turned out that it was not at all the right thing to have gone to war with Iraq. It was invoked to set up Gitmo; have right-to-lifers shooting abortionists; let criminals (who are clearly unrepentant and dangerous to society) go free because they have ‘paid society back for their crimes’ by time spent in jail; or parental physical abuse of a child in the name of good parenting. .

It is rarely found outside one’s self. One reaches a set of rules by trial and error, through life. For some, it simply means not getting caught doing what you know is wrong. For others, it is always giving to others and never to one’s self, as opposed to the ‘me-first’ people.

In truth, ‘the right thing to do’ is arrived at in a very subjective way and can be evaluated by the gain to the ‘doer’ and the pain to the recipient.