Doing a bad thing does not make you "a bad person", and working for charity does not make you "a good person," either. Of course, this begs the question, what is a person? and How do we, why should we rank or measure up ourselves? Sorry. That was off-topic. For the sake of actually getting this done, I'm going to forgo the soapbox philosophy rant.
No, I do not think that any actions can totally annihilate other actions. Yes, we can fix problems we've caused, depending on the problem, but that does not mean that the initial action never occurred. And sometimes you can't even fix the problem completely. You can't bring a person back to life. You can't allow a civilization to reach the full potential it might have if you had helped it out more after it was hit by, say, a typhoon.
No matter what inspired or motivated a good deed, it should still be appreciated and thought of as a good deed; people should always be given second chances. Sometimes peoples' motivations for doing charity are not so pure -- this should be kept in mind, I think, and we should make sure to teach up-and-coming people to do good for the right reasons, but we should not totally write off good deeds done to alleviate guilt or build up the reputation of the do-gooder. It still helped.
Nobody automatically has an "obligation" to help others as soon as they're born, in my opinion. That has to come from within. Personally, I feel a driving impulse to do good, because I know it's the right thing to do and I feel like it's the least I could do, considering all the uncountable, immeasurable miracles and gifts people, the world, and life in general has given to me. And while I think that the world might be a lot happier, harmonious, and peaceful if everyone felt a strong inclination to do good, I also think that life is definitely what you make it and that a person's motivation to improve the Earth really must come from within.
From a governmental point of view, every country that has the ability to lend a hand to other countries absolutely should. The whole "hey it's a whole other country let them figure it out for themselves" mindset flusters me; we're all on the same planet, aren't we? Are these other people so hard to relate to, so very different from us, just because they live on the other side of an artificial border? While whether or not people "should" is a personal decision, governments should, in my opinion. (It's just the right thing to do, and pragmatically, don't they want other countries to help them in their time of need?) Well, let me revise that. If the majority of people in a country want the government to help other countries, then they should. If not enough want that -- well, that's really depressing, but we have to stay diplomatic.
I hope people aren't tired of helping others. I think a large part of the reason that people don't is because they 1) don't know about/understand problems 2) don't take the problems seriously or 3) don't know what they can do to help. I try to help as much as I can, though lately, sad to say, I haven't been involved in anything in particular, besides attending STATE (Students Taking Action for Tolerance and Equality) meetings (which meet 7 a.m. on Wednesday mornings in Ms. Boulay's Science classroom, ALL ARE WELCOME), buying fair-trade/organic stuff in general, stuff like that. A month or two ago, I was working with my totally rad cousin Rafe, who was working with a non-for-profit organization to provide Kenyan Internally Displaced People (IDPs) in refugee camps with food and water. (Rafe was actually in Kenya for a couple months [absurdly cool, I am so jealous], with a host family, working on that project.) The fundraiser was a pretty solid success, glad to say. I'd really like to do that kind of thing when I, too, am a college-educated 20-something with time to kill with social activism. Global activism is way up there on my mental list of possible careers. Also, I plan to never be rich when I grow up, if you know what I mean. (Go donating to charity. Woot woot!)
My favorite quotes are: "Be the change you wish to see in the world," as said by Mahatma Gandhi, and "You have everything you need for complete peace and total happiness right now," from Wayne Dyer. As for the Gandhi quote, I agree with it, because the only way to peace is by being peaceful (Gandhi himself is an excellent example), the only way to improving the earth in general is by being a proactively charitable person. And I wholeheartedly believe in Dyer's quote: Lately I've been of the mind that, going along with my theory on reincarnation, our life/world/universe is Eden/Heaven/whatever you want to call it, that all of our problems are self-imposed (not necessarily self-self-imposed, but at least human race-imposed), and that life is really one big miracle that encompasses innumerable other miracles. This gets tricky in the case of a person who is unhappy and ill at ease because of things in their life they didn't cause, like a really bad domestic abuse situation or living in a really poor country or whatnot. Still, though, we always have opportunities to fix our lives and make ourselves happy, or others have opportunities to help us.
There you have it. A blog that's only one day late. xD
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