Only recently have I come to believe goodness—with its accompaniments of honesty, generosity, and inclusion—is a choice rather than an innate state of being. One might even say “state of grace.”

Perhaps I am late to this lesson, grounded in the mystical as I am, but having the character of our president smashed like a poisonous cream pie into our faces daily, the lies, the meanness, the duplicity, has shaken my faith in innate human kindness. He has no inner moral compass and, as he rants, hatred and division grow. Vast numbers of people are reveling in their darker selves. 

In my mind’s eye I see a graph with a straight horizontal line that represents a more or less benign baseline, though it feels more alive than benign. Moving over, under, and along it is a second line that may be wobbly, or as erratic as an EKG printout, or as jagged as a stock market index. It can roam or slide. It can meander but, if watched carefully, you see it tends upward or downward.

This second line charts the acts of goodness v. acts of selfishness of any and every individual—sometimes me. Simultaneously it measures what the person believes and feels because actions, beliefs, and feelings are co-joined. A continuing “state of grace” is not a guarantee.

Above the horizontal mid-line is the area of the graph showing compassionate, constructive actions of goodness—an acting out in our lives of love towards others—respect, generosity, doing unto others as you would wish them to do unto you, even basic politeness. Below the line are varying degrees of the opposite—selfishness, ignoring, harming. 

The very existence of this graph shows that in my personal striving for truth—a construct I am dependent upon—I have moved from a belief of goodness as an abiding impulse in everyone to a choice of individuals. This was, especially at first, a profound disappointment. A mooring is gone.

Still, I have always thought that people who have done great harm and then decide to change their lives, outlooks, and actions are the bravest among us—the addict that rises into caregiving, the criminal who becomes a reformer. I understood they made choices. They knew what they were capable of and they chose to do good. I do not expect the same of our president.

Watching the evidence, I felt my certainty of human goodness slip away. We are feebler and stronger than creatures with guaranteed impulses toward goodness. Feebler because we are not imbedded with hard and true morals, and stronger because we can rise to goodness as a choice even if the benefits to ourselves are not immediately apparent.

The world presents plenty of evidence that good actions are not a given. We with food let people starve, we with opportunity shut out desperate people at our borders, we with fear let innocent people be bombed, we let animals be harmed and the earth be sacrificed. We choose not to see that we are the terrorists, the selfish, the withholders. Most of us justify ourselves blindly and shamelessly. 

Through our free will we determine not only how we will act, but, first, how we feel and what we believe. We make non-stop decisions that craft our lives. We cannot avoid this, but we can choose our options, decision by decision, action by action. We can build habits—venues is perhaps more accurate—of perceptions and actions that build the world we experience as real. We can curse what is dark and promulgate it or embrace what is light and share it.

Love is the resource, but free will determines if we access care, empathy, inclusion. It determines what we do about education for all, health care for all, financial means for all, care of our planet, and protection of the innocent. It allows us to see strangers as friends.

Goodness may be an option, but it is not a fantasy. It is real and the only viable option.