How to be a good person

I believe that the average individual wants to be a good person and occasionally considers whether or not they are one.

Perhaps they think about it enough to rationalize that whatever they currently do already makes them better than most people. Others might decide they don’t really care, and this apathy is satisfying to them.

There are others still who figure they would be unable to put in enough effort to make any worthwhile difference in the world or to other people. Making a difference to just one person seems to be enough to me, but that argument is for another day.

And of course, there are those who work very hard to do what they believe is the right thing.

I don’t want to try to qualify specifically what makes a person decent, but I do want to consider the overall subject.

There are a lot of Americans – roughly 300 million. Lately, U.S. economics has been presenting us with numbers so large that words like “million” and “billion” have lost their punch. And that was hard enough to think about even before we started hearing the word “trillion.”

I find that it helps if I compare such numbers to more common-sense values. So let us try to grasp what 300 million Americans would look like.

If we all packed in together as tight as possible for a John Mellencamp concert, the stadium would need to cover an area of some 15 square miles, or about the size of Bloomington.

Or if back when you were in fourth grade, your teacher had started a fast-paced roll call of one American per second, they would have just finished this year (assuming you are about 20 years old).

OK, so there are a lot of us. What could we manage to accomplish if all of us doubled our efforts to be “good” people? That is asking a lot, so let’s go for just a meager 5 percent more effort. In fact, let us say that only half of all Americans chose to do this. What then could be accomplished in one year? Let us quantify the possibilities by using some standard ideas about what are “good” things to do.

If 5 percent more effort meant recycling just one more sheet of computer paper each year, this would add up to over 1 million pounds of recycled paper and over 7,000 trees saved.

If 5 percent equated to climbing one more flight of stairs in a whole year, this would add up to 22,500 total pounds of American fat lost per year, enough volume to fill up 5,700 two-liter bottles.

And if 5 percent was one more hour of volunteering a year, the work accomplished would be equivalent to 75,000 people working full-time jobs during that year.

But is this actually asking for 5 percent or more like a fraction of a percent? Either way, as a result of the sheer number of people in this one country, an astronomical amount of good could be accomplished by a very slight increase in effort among the majority of us. The smallest effort is never too little to make a difference.


E-mail: tylatkin@indiana.edu