(Warning: The following blog post features earnest, heart-felt expressions of humanity from a bona-fide bleeding heart liberal. Read on at your own peril.)
The past couple of weeks have been wildly cathartic for me, in both the micro and the macro. Recently, I have been trying to help my mother care for my 84-year-old father, who is battling an advancing case of dementia. As his memory and impulse control are rapidly deteriorating, he tends to yell and scream when he is disoriented, angry or fearful. One such scene played out last week in the parking garage of a medical building where he was going to see one of his doctors. The parking attendant couldn't recognize the hunched over, grey-haired old man carrying on in front of him as someone struggling with a problem beyond his control. The man stood toe-to-toe with my father, engaged in a heated shouting match that threatened to become physical. Were it not for my mother's and my intervention, it would have come to blows or the police might have been called. I attempted to reason with the man to please try to see that my father isn't well. What was so hard for him to understand? What was missing from this man's comprehension or heart? In a word... compassion.
Meanwhile, watching the news reports from the Gulf Coast, I couldn't help but be struck that a very similar dynamic seemed to be playing itself out at the Presidential level. There was clearly suffering but where was the appropriate response? Where was the compassion? It seemed to take President Bush a week before he recognized the crisis for what it was... a colossal PR disaster. When he finally leapt into the fray, he promised relief from the "armies of compassion." Aside from the vagueness of the statement, the very juxtaposition of those two words was troubling. Armies are deployed to move with precision against our enemies... or at least our perceived enemies... to make war. Armies are good for blowing big holes in the landscape and laying waste to all that stands in their path. Armies invade, advance, shoot, kill, capture and destroy. If there's another purpose for an army, I haven't seen it lately. And, as our foreign policy has been solely characterized by this kind of militaristic conquest in recent times, I just couldn't wrap my head around the idea of an "army of compassion". But hey... maybe I didn't understand the meaning of the word compassion. So I went to Webster's Dictionary...
Compassion (noun)
1. A deep awareness of and sympathy for another's suffering.
2. The humane quality of understanding the suffering of others and wanting to do something about it.
Nope, that's what I thought it meant. The word implies caring to the point of motivation and being able to get outside of the scope of your own experience to truly comprehend the situation of another. I double-checked the Wikipedia, just to make sure I wasn't off the mark. Here's an excerpt...
"Compassion is a sense of shared suffering, most often combined with a desire to alleviate or reduce such suffering. Compassionate acts are generally considered those which take into account the suffering of others and attempt to alleviate that suffering as if it were one's own."
Well that cemented it for me. I suddenly understood something with blinding clarity. I knew why there was such outrage in the face of a tremendous natural disaster. It wasn't just plain ineptitude. It was something more unnerving. It was the inability to identify with so many of those that were hardest hit. As the images of the victims began running non-stop on our televisions, I was shocked to hear people all around me questioning why "those people" didn't leave. Why they sat idle and just let the storm come crashing down on their homes. Why it didn't occur to them to get out... to have a better plan... to have some place else to go. And that prevailing perspective is, as far as I can tell, what lies at the heart of what went wrong. It kept anyone on the local, state or federal level from really being able to anticipate or respond to those who have always been the invisible members of society. People who didn't have the means or the ability to get out of town. Maybe they get their government checks at the beginning of the month and had the rotten luck to have to face a hurricane that showed up at the end of the month. Whatever the reason, we were suddenly confronted with people we don't like to acknowledge. And, if we didn't see them on all the 24-hour news channels, starving and scared, we might not have had to deal with their existence even then. Adding insult to injury, our President's mother gave us an insight into her true feelings when she said of the evacuees in the Astrodome "...So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." Somehow on September 11th, 2001, it was about all of us. We were all attacked. We were all in it as one. We were all Americans. But that wasn't the case this time and it was clear. The missing component? Compassion.
Answers and inspiration sometimes come from the unlikeliest places. Over the weekend, I was watching a TiVo-ed episode of the ABC late night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live. Via remote, Jimmy had as his guests the Moutra family from Stafford, Texas, who have taken more than two dozen Katrina evacuees from New Orleans into their modest family home. The image of that living room crowded full of people who had a place to stay and food to eat due to this one compassionate family had Kimmel choking back tears. I wasn't nearly as stoic as I watched and wept. As Jimmy is a personal friend of mine, I e-mailed him and got contact information for Billye Moutra, who told me that her community and the school at which she works is providing for about 300 Katrina victims from the New Orleans area. True to the famous line from the play set in the city of New Orleans, this was "the kindness of strangers" at its finest. I have offered my help to this grass roots cause as their efforts are a ray of hope at a time when I didn't know where to turn.
My atheist friends don't like when I cite phrases rooted in my spirituality that help to govern my life. But there's one that, I think if we all could embrace, would lead us all to be more compassionate. Put simply... "There but for the grace of God go I."