Were you a goodie or a baddie?

[Beebo]

This is a very interesting article on the BBC web site.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16180030

How do you view your life, and your past actions?

 

[ianrauk]

I was a baddie. In school and afterwards. I can honestly say that I was a nasty piece of work.
I am certainly not proud of some of my past and what I got up to, but it is just that, the past, it happened and it's what & who I was.

I would like to think over the past dozen years I have made up in spades for some of the bad stuff I did. For that I thank Mrs Ian, for it was she that dragged me from the brink and back on to the right track.

 

[tyred]

A goodie of course

 

[numbnuts]

Of course I was a goody, but everybody else thought I was a little shoot

 

[sdr gb]

I must have been a goodie because Santa brought me presents every year.

 

[Titan yer tummy]

Well done Beebo for finding this superb piece of writing. I'm sure that some people are more good than bad; ipso facto the reverse must apply.

The ability to review our lives and identify this is important. But where this article particularly resonates with me is that the author having actually identified in his memory banks a particular piece of badness has had the decency, humility and courage to see the effects that this badness had on himself and his mates and to own up to it in public.

Perhaps all of us reading such an article will take the opportunity to think of one of our own badnesses and then analyse it to really understand the wider effects it had.

To own to it in public, now that is very, very humbling.

TyT

 

[Night Train]

I was a good guy, slightly tainted by mistakes made through being lead astray, but still a good guy.

 

[Silver Fox]

As a youngster I was a bit of a baddie, nothing criminal or bullying mind, a boisterous likeable rogue my teacher once described me as. In my adult life I've done and said things I bitterly regret, but if we're honest, haven't we all.

 

[Beebo]

At school I was generally good and feared letting my parents down.

The part of my life that I most regret was university, where I hung round in what can only be descibed as a "Rugger Bugger Clique." I think there's one in every university rugby club. We spent our time thinking we were incredibly clever and funny but looking back we were generally being total arses to everyone we met, and for that I feel eternal shame.

 

[Bicycle]

When my elder son was about six, I was in a cafe with him in the Turkish quarter of Sarajevo, near the MOD. Two senior officers (Bosniak) were at the table behind us.

My son asked very loudly whether these guys had been in the war (which had ended a couple of years earlier).

When told that they probably had, he asked equally loudly whether they'd been Goodies or Baddies.

That sort of put the whole 'civil war' thing into context for me.

 

[007fair]

I was expecting the article to be a short skim read .. but boy that was deep! Very well written.. like a short story.

I was more lazy and weak rather than bad. I certainly did and said things I regret but i also remember apologising to friends afterwards if I did step out of line, so i wasn't all bad.
I could get sucked into trouble (driving parents car at 15 etc) by hanging with the wrong people and just being one of them but never in anything violent or addictive (drugs).

Where I feel bad was by just not caring about how hard my parents tried to get me to work at school and achieve something. I just didn't bother and I hate thinking what they must have went through. Laziness also lost me a girl who I still think may have been the one ! Gee ..

 

[Titan yer tummy]

I was expecting the article to be a short skim read .. but boy that was deep! Very well written.. like a short story.

I was more lazy and weak rather than bad...

I think 007 hits the nail right on the head; the fault is laziness, weakness or perhaps being a coward (and I hasten to add that I do not suggest that 007 is either). This story is so powerful because the author has identified the defect in himself and them examined its effects in detail. This will help him (and hopefully me) resist the temptation to take the easy way in the future.

TyT