Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should
(A Lesson on Opportunity and Restraint)
Human beings are capable of a great many things… some mundane, some divine, some incredibly evil, some incredibly good, and a whole lot of in-between. But of the many things that we can accomplish if we choose, not all of them represent appropriate choices.
In other words, just because you can … doesn’t mean you should.
YOU CAN treat others as if they are property you own rather than as persons with whom you can build a relationship that makes it possible to earn their love. You can especially do this if you are able to make them believe you are more powerful or more deserving than they are. You can also believe or pretend that this is the healthiest form of relationship of which you are capable.
But just because you can … doesn’t mean you should.
Actually, though, considering the way many people seem to think as they go about their everyday lives, it’s not surprising that some of us wind up in unhealthy relationships
If you are an average American, for example, you can spend about 29 cents more when you by a fast-food meal at lunch and probably get extra French fries and a huge drink. You can take ten-minute showers with incredibly hot water. You can lounge in rooms with air-conditioning thermostats set at 62 degrees in the summer and at 80 when it’s cold outside. You can wish for or buy a huge automobile that you don’t really need which gets only about ten miles to a gallon of gas. Then, if you are privileged to drive one of these vehicles, you can routinely go twenty miles above the speed limit, throw garbage out of the window onto the street, flirt with other travelers, send text messages with your cell phone, or eat a salad from a container on your lap.
But just because you can … doesn’t mean you should.
Also – if you are a typical American – you can pass by or notice homeless street people with crude cardboard signs day after day and never stop to offer help of any kind. You can drink too much alcohol, smoke too much tobacco, and maybe even make a secret purchase of illegal drugs now and then. You can watch yourself gain weight while you also watch yourself avoid exercise as if it were a deadly disease. Then, you can witness some of your friends or family members going through multiple medical procedures to try to make abused bodies healthy… and still seem to be clueless that over-indulgence and skimpy self-maintenance is bad for your health.
But just because you can do all that … doesn’t mean you should.
You can work too much and play too little, or play too much and work too little. You can spend too much money and save too little, or save too much money and spend too little. You can play more to your anger than your compassion, or allow yourself to be victimized by someone who does. You can spend more time playing with your friends than you do taking care of your family, or spend so much time with your family that you never have time to even develop friendships… let alone play with them. You can avoid developing relationships with people you see every day until and unless they do something that causes you a problem. Then you can carelessly get off on the wrong foot in a relationship you now cannot avoid. You can demonstrate coldhearted disrespect for the fragile world we live in only to painfully discover the error of your ways later…even if that means in the afterlife.
You can also pretend none of this really matters.
But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
If you are like many people reading this right now, you can watch too much TV, ignore important issues and vote too seldom or not at all, and never make friends with yourself enough to be comfortably by yourself. You can read only when you have to, do little or nothing with passion and excitement, stay silent when you should speak up, speak up when you should shut up, ignore or reject people who are (or have been) important in your life, or fall victim to the false pride of thinking you’re always right about anything. You can break promises, break hearts, or break with tradition. You can complain without making much of an effort to change what you complain about; you can take all of your life for granted and be upset when the grant predictably runs out; or you can ignore what is truly important while you deal with the stresses of the drama you have made of your life.
But just because you can… doesn’t mean you should.
And if you have read this far, you can even let this commentary mean nothing to how you think in the future about your relationship with the world you live in, and the people who live in it with you.
You can… but should you?
Robert Simon
Violence Prevention Specialist
Start Strong Wichita – a project of Catholic Charities
