Photo: Thinkstock

In a void, we’re all the good ones. I remember, very vividly, reading The Diary of Anne Frank as an impressionable, sheltered young girl -- the worst trauma in my life so far had been Jason Reichart unzipping my dress while we were waiting in line for school pictures -- and making an impassioned vow that if I had been alive during World War II I would have been brave, I would have been fearless, I would have saved everyone! The next day in school there was Jason Reichart teasing my neighbor and, naturally, being actually a shy and retiring creature, I just watched, my cheeks flushing, fuming quietly. After all, it’s easiest to be the brave one when not actually called upon to be brave.

Writer Anthony McGowan discusses this phenomenon for the  BBC News, saying, “There is, of course, an almost irresistible human impulse to look on ourselves as the goodies or - with a little more grandiosity - as the heroes of our own narratives, whether we're fighting over the height of our neighbour's leylandii hedge or authorising air strikes on crumbling dictatorships.”  But, he urges us to wonder, are we really the goodies or, possibly, the baddies?

What follows is a thoughtfully rendered tale remembered from Anthony McGowan’s childhood, an event that revealed to him that, though he saw himself as one of the good guys, he was in reality no better than the bullies he dreaded, and capable of much meanness himself. After all, he points out, throughout history many notorious “baddies” have seen themselves as crusading for the powers of good. Could we be, in the narratives of our own lives, just as deluded?

Ways To Be a “Goodie”:
24 Acts of Kindness
Being Courageous