Most People are Good

It’s summer, and that means road trips. We’ve taken a couple long trips to West Virginia and Northern
Wisconsin but mostly we have just been tooling around to various places closer to home like beaches,
pools, parks and family-friend houses. Call us old fashion (not a stretch for me, I know) but we don’t
bring our own music. We don’t use a phone. We don’t have playlists or mixtapes. We don’t even use
the CD player. We just listen to the radio. Sure we have our favorite stations when we’re close to
home but we also just like to press scan to see what comes up. In the middle of places like Ohio,
Indiana or Wisconsin it’s often some evangelical Christian not so politely or subtly letting us know that
we’re going to hell. We take that as a good reminder and then we move on to the next station. One
time here in Chicago, I popped into a store for a minute and when I came back the kids were listening
to Polish rap. Nate liked it so…

Leah, Maddie and Nate getting goofy in the back seat. 

Sometimes these forays into other worlds spark questions or comments from the kids. Comments
may lead to a conversation, questions may get answered or go unanswered and then we move on to
the next station. However, a recent question from my eight year old daughter, Leah, has lingered in my
mind and then was jolted back into my mind again this week. We landed on a country station and a
Luke Bryan song was playing. I like the song, so we stayed. The name of the song is
Most People are Good and the chorus starts off with the line, “I believe most people are good.” About
halfway through the song Leah blurted out. 

Why would someone write a song that says most people are good?
Isn’t that kind of obvious? 

There was no way that I was going to shatter this outlook on life that Leah is currently holding onto so
this was one of those questions that went unanswered. I think I responded with something like “yeah
Leah, good point.” In Leah’s world, most people are good. She doesn’t need a song to remind her or
convince her. She knows it. It’s obvious to her because most of the people she deals with everyday
are “good”. She doesn’t know that a White supremacist just mowed down scores of people at a Walmart
in El Paso, or that a young man in body armor armed with an assault rifle just open fired at a bar in
Dayton, Ohio--a place we just drove past on our road trip. 

Maureen and I don’t purposely shelter our children from these things but we don’t purposely trouble
them with them, either. Sometimes they’ll catch a sound bite as we listen to NPR in the car and they
may ask a question. For example, when the news broke about children being separated from their
parents at the border, Maddie tuned in. I explained what was happening. She cried and then I cried.
However, since these terrible things are not close to home for them, they fade quickly.    

Us adults aren’t that lucky. As our worldviews expand we have a harder time separating things that
happen elsewhere with things that happen close to home. It all becomes part of our world. The good,
the bad and the ugly, but mostly the bad and the ugly. These things trouble us, as they should.
However, I think we can learn a few things from Luke Bryan and Leah. In times like these when a
statement like “most people are good” seems ridiculously or even insensitive, I think we could do well
retreat into our “close to home” world. Think about the people around you. The people in your world.
Your friends, family, coworkers, neighbors, etc… Most of them are good, aren’t they? Maybe not all of
them, but most of them. None of them are perfect. Neither are you, but most of them are good.
Be good back.   

It may never be as obvious as it was when we were eight 

but it’s more important than ever for us to believe that most people are good.