Compassion is the force that moves people towards social justice. You can see it weaving through each of the examples given below, and there are so many more. To live out the belief that we are all equals, we will need to choose compassion over money, over politics, over race, over economic status, over corporate profits, over religious dogma – over everything.
*******
To paraphrase an old saying, “Compassion is like pregnancy. There’s no such thing as a little of it.” A few recent news items will get the discussion going, but compassion is one of those subjects that can be explored again and again through happenings all around us.
Let’s begin in our own neighborhoods. Does your local school district engage in “lunch shaming?” This practice allows cafeteria workers to dump a student’s lunch tray into the trash, in front of the student and everyone else in line, if the family is behind on their cafeteria fees. Or students may have their arms stamped with a “you owe money” message, or they may be given a wrist band they must wear or a ticket pinned to their shirt for the rest of the day to remind their parents to pay up. Sometimes they are made to wipe down tables at the end of the lunch period. The policy may be applied to four-year-old preschoolers right up to the seniors in high school (What Do Unpaid Lunch Tabs Mean For Schools, by Melinda Anderson; The Atlantic, 2/9/2016).
Schools in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Texas, New Mexico and Minnesota, to name a few, have come to national attention recently for engaging in lunch shaming, so this is not an isolated practice. Some people think the approach is reasonable and right. After all, schools need money to buy the food to feed the children. Why shouldn’t parents feel the sting of having a child singled out for shame?
Other people felt enormous compassion for the children on the receiving end of such callousness. Children, after all, shouldn’t be made to suffer the consequences of problems that adults are responsible for solving. Many individuals, some with no ties to the school district, set up on-line fund raisers that allowed people to donate money to an account that payed off overdue lunch fees. No questions asked (“Donors Unite Nationwide to Pay Off Kids’ School Lunch Debts,” CBS News, 1/3/2017).
Why? Because it isn’t about the money. And it isn’t limited to making sure children don’t go hungry, because some of these schools toss the shamed child a plain cheese sandwich, like scullery scraps.
The essence of the compassionate response evoked by this news story was about making sure our children are treated as equals. The message of “shame on you” was shifted to “No matter how much money a child’s family has or doesn’t have, every child is entitled to dignity and respect in the eyes of others.” It doesn’t have to be earned. It doesn’t have to be bought. It is a birthright. If you don’t ensure it for the children, it will not magically appear one day among all adults in society as a whole.
Here’s another situation. In Missouri recently, a city passed a nuisance law against those who call 911 more than twice in 180 days to report domestic violence. Such callers are primarily women – primarily working-class women who live in rental properties. This particular municipal code gives the city the power to evict violators from their residence if they call 911 more than two times in six months (This Missouri City Banishes Domestic Violence Survivors for Calling the Police, by Sandra Park; ACLU, 4/7/2017).
In other words, the adults responsible for solving this problem chose a course of action that blamed and jeopardized the victims. To protect themselves from the physical danger of a violent abuser, callers had to risk homelessness. It’s only right, said the proponents. They are the ones using these expensive municipal services and we need to cut our costs.
The Equal Housing Council sued the city, noting that the ordinance was unfair, as it forced a disproportionate number of minorities, women and the disabled out of their homes. In other words, it targeted people who were vulnerable, powerless and poor. Those are factors that increase the incidence of domestic violence, not some whimsical desire to irritate the local emergency responders.
Communities across the country have been passing local laws that punish both the tenants and the landlords when the property becomes associated with a call for help (More Than A Nuisance, by Peter Edelman; The New Republic, 4/19/2018). Whether the need for emergency services is due to stalking, harassment, assault or domestic violence, these laws classify the site of the crime as a nuisance and impose threats against the landlord and/or the tenants. The ordinances do nothing to help the victims or address the problem.
The federally funded Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), on the other hand, frames the issue of domestic violence more compassionately, as a public health issue. Their materials draw upon communication skills needed to defuse volatile situations, anger management programs, mental and psychological health resources, services for child raising, interrupting the cycle of abuse, safe houses for victims and increased awareness of the impact on children’s school performance.
The CDC programs focus on addressing this complex issue holistically, through all of its causes and consequences. Their resources are available for free to police departments, first responders, social workers and community service organizations everywhere.
Moving onto the national level, the Republican Congress recently presented their health care bill. Paul Ryan referred to it as “an act of mercy.” The new bill, however, did not cover mental illness and pre-existing conditions such as cancer, lung and heart issues, diabetes and multiple sclerosis. It dramatically increased costs for working class families and senior citizens. It also classified all women, by virtue of their sex, as pre-existing conditions, while eliminating coverage for women’s health issues.
Under the existing Affordable Care Act (ACA/Obamacare), all of those factors are treated as of equal importance. The Republican’s replacement version repealed taxes levied against the rich that helped fund the ACA, so it seemed to be an act of mercy only for the wealthy.
Senator Joe Kennedy, a Democrat, gave voice to the opposition:
“I was struck last night by a comment I heard made by Speaker Ryan, where he called this repeal bill, quote, an ‘act of mercy,'” Kennedy stated. “With all due respect to our speaker, he and I must have read different scripture. The one that I read calls on us to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless and to comfort the sick. It reminds us that we are judged not by how we treat the powerful, but how we care for the least among us. There is no mercy in a system that makes healthcare a luxury. There is no mercy in a country that turns its back on those most in need of protection — the elderly, the poor, the sick and the suffering. . . This is not an act of mercy. It’s an act of malice.
The difference in the two political parties in their approach to the health care debate has been the difference between crunching numbers and looking at people, all people, with compassion.
President Trump rarely comments on the effects his own proposals will have on individuals. However, he tried to express compassion after news programs showed the effects of chemical weapons on Syrian civilians. “No child of God should ever suffer such horror,” he said.
He was immediately mocked at home and abroad. This is the same person whose domestic policies include cutting health care for children, cutting food programs for children, cutting childcare and special needs programs, allowing exposure of children to toxins that damage brain cells and allowing the pollution of our environment. The military budget, meanwhile, is being given a whopping increase.
Trump’s failure to respond to Puerto Rico’s devastation following hurricane Maria followed this pattern of showing no compassion for the people affected by the tragedy.
Trump’s policies regarding the children and families who are refugees from Central America have been devoid of compassion. We have watched in horror as the cameras show us parents and children being forcibly separated and children placed inside cages at detention centers or being made to defend themselves in court at the age of 3. Reports of hate crimes and child predators guarding the people being detained are rampant (Here is Just Some of the Hateful Abuse Immigrants Face In Detention Centers, by John Washington; The Nation, 6/27/2018).
Too often our elected officials portray themselves as compassionate souls, only to betray their fundamental callousness towards the welfare of others when it comes to money, or religious dogma or personal behavior. This happens locally and at the state level just as surely as it happens nationally.
The same might be said of each of us from time to time. Confident that we are compassionate people, we overlook the ways in which daily life constantly puts our compassion to the test. It’s easy to be moved by the suffering of people we love and interact with daily, harder to appreciate how the stranger on the train or the unknown deportee might suffer.
For that reason, I am drawing on the situations described above to fashion a primer on compassion. It’s a chance to reflect more fully on this concept, and to see the ways it might influence our own actions as one member of a society of equals.
- Compassion is an emotional “suffering-with” the plight of other human beings. Be it hunger, homelessness, disasters or tragedies, we can imagine ourselves in the same shoes. Even with the more ambiguous experiences of prejudice, oppression and powerlessness, compassion imagines that experience and lets us know how bad it feels. Compassion helps us to recognize and understand the suffering of others.
- Compassion helps us to behave in ways that alleviate that suffering. It is our felt emotional kinship with others that that gives rise to action on their behalf. Compassion brings with it a motivation to do something to alleviate the suffering of others.
The Women’s March on Washington gave us a wonderful example. It motivated millions of people around the world to pay attention to the horrific costs of marginalizing others: the recurring violence against members of the black and Muslim communities, the challenges of the disabled and the mentally ill, suicides among Native Americans and LGBTQ people, persecution of refugees and immigrants, disrespect for women and all who are fighting now to be seen as equals.
We have been unable to mount an equally strong response to the horrors of having our government forcibly separate families at the border, and the equal horrors of allowing the existence of massive detention centers. Individuals and small groups have tried mightily to be a voice for the oppressed, but we haven’t seen the multitudes rising up as they did for the Women’s March.
With such large and prevalent inequalities in our midst, it’s not enough to read and think, not enough to be informed. Compassion compels us to actively address such issues in any way we can.
- No matter how complex the issue, compassionate approaches take everyone into consideration. When solutions to our problems with equality favor some, those actions and policies only serve to marginalize the rest as if “they” are not equals.
Compassion gives rise to actions that include and empower the very people who are currently powerless and excluded from the fullness of community life. If we are going to live as equals, our solutions to issues within our communities and our nation as a whole have to find a holistic, inclusive path to resolution.
The heavy lifting of creating equality is never done. There will always be new reasons to gather and unify so that we can rise up on behalf of those who are denied full participation in society.
- Compassion isn’t something we can compartmentalize.
Compassion doesn’t come from an intellectual consideration of the pros and cons of helping which people when. It doesn’t come from being struck by some graphic images of disaster on TV. It doesn’t come in the form of a Republican agenda or a Democratic agenda, a conservative Christian or a progressive socialist.
Compassion comes in response to any person of any age, gender, nationality, religion, occupation or other circumstance who has to fight to be treated with equal dignity, equal concern. It can’t be limited to certain people, certain times, certain places. Compassion is about bringing people, all people, into the fullness of a worthwhile life – correcting imbalances and blockages that prevent their equal participation.
Compassion finds expression everywhere. All the time. It wells up from inside whenever and wherever other human beings are suffering and sorrowing.
- Having a sense of compassion goes hand-in-hand with recognizing others as equals.
The absence of compassion makes for some glaring examples of treating some people better than others. Without compassion, we blame others for their fate. We rationalize – construct reasons why others are in the situations they’re in. They’re lazy. They aren’t God-fearing people who go to church on Sundays. They didn’t pay attention in school. They weren’t raised right. And so on. This way of thinking pushes people out of the way forward, off to the side of the road.
A compassionate person, however, wants to bring everyone into the process of moving forward. When someone needs assistance, movement forward stops until we find a way to help. Compassionate people are the ones trying to help those who are stuck: the refugees, the hungry, the marginalized and victims of all kinds. Having compassion is one sure sign of your awareness that, underneath it all, we are all equals.
Bottom line: When someone needs assistance, movement forward for everyone stops until we find a way to help. We don’t progress as a society, we don’t improve, we stay stuck in time, unless we take care of the ones who need our help.
