a Seems Like God Reflection,
by David Keating

A Little Bit

January 12, 2008

"There's a little bit of good in the worst of us, and a little bit of bad in the best of us." You may have heard this before. It's a variation on a saying by Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote, among other things, Treasure Island. Strangely enough, I first read the quote in a comic book. I was maybe twelve at the time. It was a crime story, about a kidnapper who sacrifices himself to save the child he'd kidnapped. The quote was the epitaph uttered by the cop standing over the body in the last panel of the comic.

Those words have stuck with me for forty years.

It would be so much easier to make decisions if the world were nicely divided into good guys and bad guys wouldn't it? I think that one of the reasons that I remember that quotation so vividly is because up until that time that's the way my young mind saw things. The good guys wore white hats. The bad guys wore black.

Unfortunately, as Paul said, as we grow up we have to put aside the simplistic way that we used to see the world. Life isn't as neat and tidy as a movie and it seldom offers us the absolute answers that we'd like. In big things and small, life tends to be somewhat more grey than black and white.

How, for instance, do we respond to the guy who donates his time to the community, is first on the scene in a crisis, but who has what used to be called "wandering hands"?

Or the mother who juggles a job, a home, and still bakes for her daughter's sports club, but who never misses an opportunity to belittle that same daughter in front of her friends?

Or the boss who is brilliant at scheduling production, always exceeds corporate targets, and got the cafeteria vending machines replaced, but who has never promoted one of "those" people (whoever "those" may be), and has made it clear that he never will?

On the up side, we're not as tolerant of those behaviours as we once were. We're not so easily swayed by the concept that "rank hath its privileges". Nor are we as likely to believe that we "can't fight city hall."

On the down side, we seem to have slipped towards a mindset that says that since no one is really "good", then we might as well all enjoy being "bad". We idolize celebrities whose primary contribution seems to be the level of excess that they're able to achieve. We make heroes of gangsters. And we make excuses for not being involved with the people next door who need a hand.

However, there's another way to look at little bit of bad and little bit of good. We don't have to go to either extreme. We can use both to achieve balance.

We can realize that we don't need to be perfect in order to do good. And that no matter how hard we try there are going to be times that little bit of bad means that we fail to live up to our own expectations.

Stevenson didn't actually use the words "little bit". He actually said "There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us".

I like that. Even if we seem to be able to get the "so much bad" part pretty easily, while the "so much good" part seems to be a struggle.

That's unfortunate. Because if we could just let ourselves believe that there really is so much good in us, we might come to feel that we could pass some of it around.

Even just a little bit.

David Keating