Saturday
June 29, 2024 
Many Americans are slowly letting go of the fear that made us dubious about the future of our great nation.
Even recognizing the huge toll these past few years took on America’s landscape and population, for the most part, we continued to work, we dealt with the anxiety, and many of us agreed to accept whatever the election brought us. Others, not so much.
Disappointment hurts whether it’s platonic, passionate, or political ... but, eventually, we’ll heal. These last few years, our effort to peacefully co-exist got dinged. We doubted our strength as a unique, cohesive society. Ergo, our unilateral, instinctive compassion for one another faltered, but what would life be without compassion?
Even as COVID hit around our nation, most of us shined in service to others. Those who could, stepped up their game to help others whether: delivering vital commodities or services; checking on each other in quarantine; heeding the medical precautions for ourselves and each other; or serving as essential emergency and medical personnel. Whether due to our job or our compassion, we made sacrifices for one another.
Our ability as humans to feel for others, to put ourselves in other people’s places, to try to feel their suffering, and put others before our self, are all driven by compassion. Without suffering of our own, it’s a hard thing to learn but, without learning it, it’s impossible to live a truly human life.
Lately, we’re hearing a lot about narcissism. Compassion and narcissism don’t mix and the discussion thereof isn’t a distraction or shell game; it’s just fact.
Years ago, a psychologist and I talked about narcissism; my personal experience is long over but it was familial and extended. Narcissism is a skill perfected out of necessity during the developmental years, a survival tactic, and is less sleight of hand than simply reflex – a real response to a skewed reality. It’s more something they simply are and not just a habit they have to break.
They lack compassion. Why they do is obvious: they must always win. Anyone who empathizes, puts others first, or recognizes the needs or valor of others can’t always win, and narcissists must always win. They must be the first, fastest, smartest, and best. Their own reality is the only reality they can see. Whether their beliefs are true or not, doesn’t matter. They can only see what’s real to them.
Still, compassion is most of what makes life tolerable and safe. Love is great, that’s true, but it’s not enough, because we don’t all love each other past the humanity that binds us. Compassion makes strangers pick us up in a stampede, even when they don’t know who we are.
After 9/11, we talked about many situations of people serving in that crisis. One chat was about two men in Manhattan fleeing from the havoc that engulfed downtown. We talked about the dust being so thick that people were covered; they couldn’t see or breathe. A man fell and couldn’t get up. Out of invisibility came a hand, “Come brother, let’s get the hell out of here.” One man was a Muslim, the other a Hasidic Jew. That’s compassion – pausing in the midst of fleeing from possible death to lift someone who needs that hand, moreover, not caring who they are. Life without it would be a pit of despair.
In the old movie, “The Body Snatchers,” people are being duplicated inside pods. Their pod doubles have no souls, no compassion. It was supposed to make life less complicated; every man for himself, so to speak. It demonstrated just how cataclysmic that would be.
It’s not hard to see what life could be without compassion. Look to history, from Caligula, to ancient Rome, Nazi Germany, and to several nations right now, where people are refugees in such deadly danger as to flee from their own government. Those who aid such governments, share, endorse or support such power, are complicit in all crimes, suffering and subjugation.
There’s nothing about compassion that makes anyone weak. Indeed, it’s our compassion that displays our strength. Caring for each other is the very soul of humans and the very basis of humanity’s existence.
Of all the qualities we must instill in our children, this one is the most valuable to them and has the longest, deepest meaning and affect on everyone around them. Conversely, life for anyone who cannot display it is a loss and misery for them, as well as for all those whom they affect.
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