It Sounds Cliché, but It’s Easier Said Than Done: Do the Right Thing

“Doing the right thing” is about as cliché a motto or theme as you can imagine. But I want to harp and stress it anyway, to myself among others, because acting on the right thing to do can actually be very difficult in real life, when all incentives point to doing otherwise. My theological framework and faith are a lot more complex than that, I’m faced with moral dilemmas where I can either do the right thing or take the easy way out.

I’m watching a show where the main character is a notorious mob boss. He is responsible for a lot of killing, but it’s complicated because he’s a member of a disenfranchised minority group. But he does take occasional moral stands, and he believes fascism is wrong. He believes it’s his responsibility to stop fascism in its track.

He infiltrates the local fascist party during the 1930s, and the very intelligent, calculating man who seems to always win and get what he wants, for the first time, loses. He tries to report on the fascists to the government, only for fascist sympathizers in the government to kill his allies and other people trying to do the right thing.

I trust my gut, maybe to a fault. There are times when my read on the right thing to do ended up actually being very wrong. As someone who has input about disabled children’s placement decisions at IEP meetings, there are times when I’ve advocated for a student to be in a more inclusive setting, only for it to not work out.

I have advocated as a special education teacher and IEP chair for students to be moved out of self-contained (students with IEPs not being in a classroom with non-disabled peers) into an inclusion setting — and they were not successful. They had to be moved back to self-contained. Likewise, there were times I advocated keeping kids in self-contained when they would have benefitted from being more independent.

I advocate and make decisions based on not only my gut but the data and information present. But there are still times when what we think is the right thing to do really isn’t. It ends up backfiring. Even today, I make choices and push initiatives at work that results in more work for my team of very stressed-out educators — it’s what I believe is the right thing to do for the students, instead of taking shortcuts that would make everyone’s life easier.

There was a time in high school when all my friends were gossiping and saying terrible things about another friend behind his back. I went and told that friend everything that was said because I thought it was the right thing to do.

It ended up backfiring and causing a massive rift in the dynamics and relationships of that friend group. The friend everyone gossiped about ended up severing all ties with the rest of the group, although we would stay close personally and he appreciated my honesty. It was considered incredibly uncool, and caused so much strife in our social circle and reputational harm that I still hear about it as a gaffe and social blunder, even nine years later (in jest, of course).

I still stand by that choice, but maybe I would go through it differently now.

In college, I was honest with someone in disagreeing with their unpopular actions. He took it as a personal attack. I’m keeping the details vague because he might read this article, but I couldn’t hear the end of how I attacked him and questioned his authority.

I learned that you can and should always pursue the right thing to do. However, there are tactful ways to go about it that don’t have to result in some sort of martyrdom.

In a world that’s broken, corrupt, and often brutal, the right thing to do doesn’t always get us ahead. It doesn’t get us a job promotion. It often doesn’t make us a lot of friends.

But if you have that nagging gut feeling that you have to do the right thing, and that doing the right thing is difficult or unpopular, I think we all need to occasionally make moral stands. I have unfortunately learned we can’t make moral stands on everything because that’s not how the world works and that’s not how a lot of corporate workplaces work.

People have finances to take care of. They have kids. Not everyone can take the risk of calling out an abusive boss or being a whistleblower in a corrupt organization when they have considerations like those.

For me, it’s about what kind of person I want to be at the end of the day when I look into the mirror. Do I want to be a person who does whatever it takes to get ahead and has no moral qualms about who I hurt or screw over? Do I want to be the person who looks for easy ways out and shortcuts? Or do I want to be the kind of person who does the right thing, even when it has no benefit to me?

I don’t want to claim to be a saint because there are plenty of times I don’t do the right thing. But if there are more and more daily situations and times when we can opt for the right thing to do over the easy one, we can sleep better at night, of course.

But the world will become a better place, even if it’s only a slight and marginal difference.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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