The Consequences of Doing Good

by Fuze Andrey

It was mentioned in class that it is hard for us to do good if the world itself is bad. In my opinion, it’s not that people don’t want to do good, it’s just that people are afraid of doing good or doing the right thing because many people would go against you. To further explain this, I would like to give an example about the politicians of our government. A lot, but certainly not all, of our government officials are corrupt and of course they have their accomplices that would help them do what they want. If you are one of the accomplices of the government official, you would most likely follow the orders of your boss because you would also benefit from it even though you know that what you are doing is against the law. You are afraid of doing what’s right because you would face a lot of enemies that could threaten you and your family. This is what’s happening in the Janet Lim-Napoles’ case. For sure she has a lot of accomplices but only a few of them were able to break their silence and went against her. This is because they are afraid of what these powerful people can do to them and to their families. It’s hard for them to do the right thing and confess what they know to the public because their lives are on stake. Sometimes doing good is the hardest thing to do because of the many consequences that comes with it.

Furthermore, when we were still young, we were always taught of doing good or doing the right thing in this world but as we grow older, we learn that there are bad things in this world that is hard for us to resist or to refuse because of certain circumstances. For example, you have a family that you have to feed three times a day everyday and you are currently having a financial crisis, you lost your job and you can’t find a new one for a very long time now, then a friend of yours offered you a job that pays a lot but is illegal. You know that it is wrong to accept that job because you might end up in jail but because you are worried about the well-being of your family, you decided to take the job because you don’t want your family to suffer. In this specific situation, the needs of your family became more important than doing the right thing. This is where the saying “Desperate times call for desperate measures” take place because sometimes, even though we know that what we are doing is wrong we tend to accept the consequences that comes with it because we have an important and maybe an acceptable reason for doing it. Just like in my example, family comes first. So sometimes we tend do the wrong things for the right reasons, and this is one of them.

In other cases, people usually go with the flow because they are afraid of being judged or of what other people might think about them just like what the “Bandwagon mentality” is about. We are afraid of going against the current because we typically don’t want to be alone in this world. The reason why we go with the flow is because we don’t want to be left out. But the ironic thing is that as we go against the


flow, we try to seek for people with the same motive as we have. So in this “bad” world of ours, it is kind of necessary for us to try and go against the current and do good to others and while doing that, we should look for other people with the same idea as we are. This could be a solution to this problem, by finding other people that wants to do good like we do, we can spread out and influence others.