Don't let the personal get in the way of the bigger picture

What ethical issues concern people the most?
This September marks the 19th year I've been writing "The Right Thing" column. What began as a monthly business ethicscolumn grew into a weekly general ethics column that is published in newspapers in the United States and Canada. Now, as I write what is column number 765, and it heads into its 20th year, it seems a good time to occasionally look back to try to make some sense of the ethical issues that concern readers the most.
While I've written about corporate malfeasance, lying executives and presidents, philandering CEOs, misguided values statements, overtaxed employees, petty theft, contested inheritances, uncivil political campaigns, cheating professional athletes, and roughly 700 other topics, the ones that garner the most attention are not what I would have expected.
Once the column has runs in the publications, which subscribe to it from the Tribune Content Agency, I post it to the column's blog. I've done this for almost 11 of the 19 years of the column's life. Among other things, the blog analytics allow me to see which columns are viewed the most. (It also allows me to see the column has a far larger readership from The Netherlands than I'd ever expect.)
Rather than large social issues involving politics, business or promiscuous scalawags, the most viewed column over the past 11 years was published in January 2006. The topic? Panhandlers who pick returnable cans and bottles from their neighbors' curbside recycling bins. It had almost twice as many views as It's the day-to-day ethical challenges we face that seem to interest us most. That's not to say that we're not concerned with the larger world around us, but who among us hasn't spent hours on the telephone trying to resolve a cellphone or cable television or internet service provider issue and come away feeling like it was the end of the world as we know it? These are not world shattering issues, but they are those that seem to consume us day in and day out. They too often are the issues that get in the way of us being able to address larger global issues such as war, famine and social injustices.
The right thing perhaps is to keep perspective. While we might be drawn to stories of recyclable cans, bad customer service and inappropriate job interviewers, we shouldn't allow these day-to-day issues to get in the way of doing what we can do to live an honest life and leave the world a bit of a better place than when we entered it. 
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 
F ollow him on Twitter: @jseglin  
(c) 2017 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.