It is Edmund Burke who is credited with saying, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." I have never known another statement to be so true, so applicable, and yet so unheeded.
I firmly believe that the majority of the people in this country are basically good people. Yet I also believe that too often all these good people "do nothing" about the things going on around them. Part of it, I believe, is the inherent fact that good people are often busy taking care of themselves, their loved ones, earning a living, doing the everyday things that need to be done. And while that is certainly not "doing nothing" it often means that nothing is being done about the big picture around them. And that is the challenge. How to continue to fulfil our obligations while yet still making a difference for good in the larger world?
Human beings are funny things when we get together in groups. We most often try to act like the group, and take our cues from the group as a whole. When the group doesn't seem to have much of an opinion or action, then the group takes its cues from the 1 or more people who actually speak up and/or do something. Then the group tends to adopt that viewpoint or action. Take politics, for example. In politics it is often the obnoxiously loud minority who is heard the most, and therefore sways many of the fence sitters. It is the relatively few people who will gather for a street protest who gain the attention and the political focus. It is the few individuals who show up to caucuses, party meetings, and primary elections who really guide what happens in their parties.
Is that bad? Sometimes it is. Why? Because it is not always a representative sample of the whole. When an opinion poll is taken, in order to get a result that is 100% correct with 100% degree of certainty and no margin of error, you have to sample every single person. But that is hard and expensive. So we take sample sizes, and with mathematical formulas we determine that if we interview a certain number of people, we can be 85% confident that their answer (plus or minus the margin of error percentage) is representative of the whole. However, 15% of the time the answer is different, and not even within the margin of error. And those numbers go up even higher when the sample is a "self selecting" one. That means people choose themselves to be part of the sample group. So what you end up with, politically, is the most vocal people are seen as a representation of the whole, and the silent majority is assumed to be represented by these people.
In today's day and age, our government is HUUUUUUUUGE! It does many things which most of the country's citizens would likely oppose if they got into the details and saw what was actually happening. For example, I just downloaded our current tax code from a government web site, and to print it out would take 8,590 pages. It contains about 3.7 million words! Now honestly, I have yet to meet a single person, regardless of party affiliation, who feels like we actually need an 8,590 page tax code, nor the hundreds of thousands of employees and contractors needed to maintain it, update it, and (most of all) enforce it. Nobody wants a tax code this long, confusing, and in many cases blatantly unfair to some people.
What's the point? We are allowing evil to triumph by doing nothing! Whether it is bad government, bad people, bad media, or whatever, we sit around and do nothing most of the time. We should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, not just assume that we can let that duty fall on others. The elections are coming up next week, many can vote now. Let's all do our homework, look at the MANY candidates and parties (not just 2) out there for president and for the other offices. Let's vote for the one that REALLY represents us. And what's more, let's be active in promoting those things to the others around us.
