Compassion only seems to be offered to those we can feel as part of our in group. I think the empathic feelings we have when we can feel the common purpose with other living things are a key component to finding or building compassion. I pity the poor ants I kill on my kitchen counter, or the mosquito I slap as it sucks my blood, as I can recognize my own will in their little decisions to invade my life. I feel very little compassion for plants, with whom I perceive almost no common ground of experience. Although after reading the Ent sections of Lord of the Rings in college, I did begin to feel some pity for the poor weeds I pulled, although that was a pretty short-lived intellectual exercise. However, empathy is only the starting place, as it may just alert us to a pain we’d sooner avoid and deny. Compassion takes caring about that suffering and I suspect once we have built a caring nature, it then gets applied for anyone we have felt empathy toward. So we have two paths to healing our divides with compassion, we can humanize our enemies, developing our empathy for them, and we can work to enhance our caring, a path more about a generalized love and acceptance.
I always thought of the right as more elitist and militaristic, so was never surprised by their advocacy of violence and their callousness to the agony of the powerless. I’ve been alarmed by the rise of the Punch-A-Nazi meme and increasing justification of violence on the left. It strikes me as an unwise departure from a progressive agenda that advocated compassion as egalitarian ideals of embracing all people’s equal humanity and of alleviating their suffering.
Somehow we need to find and encourage compassion for all our fellow humans, however misguided we may find their ideas. For me, thinking of the large minority of us who have drunk the Trump kool aid as hapless victims of a con racket, helps me feel compassion for their plight rather than animus for their crimes. Our primal urges for retribution often ends up making things worse, so even as we need to try to hold the architects and facilitators of the con responsible for the damage they have done, we should see their howling minions as victims, even more deserving of our compassion for the way it has so damaged their souls.
Happy Holly Days
HOLLY DAYS 