It Just Takes One

Seeing the movie Lincoln got me thinking about how one person can really mess things up. I don't think I need to say "spoiler alert" here or anything, I mean, we all know how things end for Abraham Lincoln. So, he gets the 13th amendment passed, the end of the Civil War is in sight, things are looking up, he can maybe relax a little, start to be happy, the country can start to heal, and then someone goes and shoots him. One person. That's it. All that work, all the fighting, all the time, all the toil, to start to finally have some light and then one person doesn't ruin it all but sure hurts a lot of people and gives a major setback.

Or take September 11th. So it wasn't one person, but it was a small group of people, in effect, almost one person if we're comparing the terrorist group to the whole number of people on Earth. Things are going ok, they are what they are, and then the attacks. It changes everything. It doesn't destroy us or ruin our lives (at least not for those of us that weren't immediately involved), but it still changes everything. We don't feel as safe and probably never will. We can't travel with near as much freedom. We changed policies that limit our freedom now in all aspects of life: workplaces, airports, schools, post offices, etc.

Think about a marriage. Isn't there a saying about how it takes two to make it work but only one to break it? It's true. It takes both people doing everything they can to keep a marriage strong. But if only one of the two decides not to, it will never matter how hard the other works or how much they want it.

I also think about it in my classroom. So often I hear other teachers talking about the difficult students: the students that take all their time, the ones that won't listen, the ones that won't seem to try or don't care and so on. And I can't help it myself. I have between 38-43 students in each of my 6 classes. And 90% of them really seem to care, really want to work hard, really are motivated to improve and do their best, etc. And I know there's a whole discussion to be had about why the kids are showing the effort that they are, good or bad, and a discussion about their backgrounds and level of support at home, etc. But that's not what I'm talking about here.

I'm just talking about how easy it is for one individual or just a few to steal all of our attention and entirely change the path we take. Even when so many are doing so much right and working so hard, we can't look away from or sometimes recover from one or a few that are doing things so wrong. Life would be so much easier if negative actions had the same impact that positive actions did. Does that make sense? No matter what, we have to remember to try not to focus on the negative and those that seem to ruin things. We have to remember how many people really are doing their very best to make the world around them a better place. And we have to remember that we need 100 times more positive than we do negative. It seems like a lot, but I think it's one of the things that make life worth it.