Compassion is the love muscle of caring.
But a lot of the muscle flexing I see going on these days is more like body building than a genuine show of strength. It looks great and makes the “flexer” feel darn good about him or herself, but other than putting on an impressive show, it doesn’t get much done. And it actually may do some real harm.
Look at all of the crocodile tears over the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370.
Granted that this is a tragic, highly unexpected event. Whether pilot error, pilot meltdown, mechanical failure, a vibrational burp in the harmonic spectrum, or some hairline gash in the condom of the space-time continuum, it happened and represents a tragic loss for the families of the passengers.
But the simple fact remains, none of us caused it. None of us can bring back to life the victims of this bizarre malfunction. None of us particularly needs this new reminder that the world we live in, even those things we so fastidiously design and meticulously create, are not and never will be perfect. Certainly none of us can even do anything to prevent it from happening again. We have no idea even what happened.
So why the media drama and obsessive news reports? And why the disproportionate and OCD level of attention to a fluke, affecting 239 people who 99.9999% of us didn’t and will never know?
Well . . . we do know why the media gave this particular event so much attention. Yes, if it bleeds it leads. But now since the spurting of blood is down to a trickle, we find the story consigned to the “back pages” of the 24/7 cyber river of pseudo news and hand-wringing, gut-wrenching, love-muscle flexing. And like the switch man at the local railway yard, we can send our trail of tears down another track. The Compassion Express is off to some brand new destination of manufactured grief.
At the same time, during the unfolding of the Malaysian airliner crisis, it was indisputable. We really cared. We really felt for those victims __ the dead and their surviving relatives and friends. By golly, it really felt good to care about others. It really showed what a good space we were in. What really kind and sensitive people we are. It really let those relatives and friends of the missing passengers know what a concerned and compassionate family the 7 billion of us fellow brothers-and-sisters-in-shared-misery are here on our shrinking planet.
Really?
Did anyone check with the families to see if they really wanted all that attention? Did we forget about something called “privacy” or “solitary mourning”? Do we actually think that mass, anonymous sharing of their grief made any of those poor, sorrowful individuals feel any better? Did anyone stop to think it might actually make them feel worse? That maybe a big group hug from millions of television voyeurs wasn’t such a great idea?
During the sanctions imposed on Iraq for their invasion of Kuwait, lasting for twelve years from 1991 until 2003 when Saddam Hussein was finally toppled by the U.S. invasion, it is estimated that over 500,000 children died of malnutrition and lack of medical supplies and proper health care.
Articles reporting this horrible tragedy started on the back pages and stayed there, or they disappeared entirely. There certainly was no outpouring of shared grief for the millions of Iraqi casualties resulting from our insidious foreign policies, including the death of over a half million children. No crocodile tears were shed outside of some very dedicated, truly caring on-the-ground aid organizations who saw first-hand the genocidal results of our cruel punishment of innocent civilians.
But there should have been.
What’s the difference between Flight 370 and sanctions on Iraq?
While we had nothing to do with the vanishing of Malaysian Flight 370, we were directly responsible for the death of those innocent children. It was our government perpetrating this horror. We could have stopped it.
Moreover, we can and should stop things like this from ever happening again, because each one of us is implicitly involved. As citizens of a democracy, each of us is directly and personally responsible for the policies and actions that come out of our often misguided representatives in Washington.
And when we murder 500,000 innocent children, that’s something to cry about.
Unlike disappearing jetliners, it’s something we could have done something about.
There is something we could do something about right now. Something we should and must do. That’s ending the illegal, immoral, and self-sabotaging murder of innocents with drones. It’s estimated that just during the Obama presidency 2400 individuals have been killed by these diabolical weapons of our errant, self-defeating foreign policy. Estimates which run as high as 37% say many of the dead are completely innocent people, having absolutely no interest or role in terrorist activities against the U.S. or its allies, mere victims of our paranoid and extralegal campaign of assassinating militants. Often these folks were just attending weddings or other family events. A lot of the killed again are children, lives cut short by being in the wrong place.
The harsh truth is that we are all complicit in these murders. It’s our government. It’s our trigger-happy Congress and President who perpetuate this carnage. This is something we should be crying about.
Crying and yelling and screaming.
Do you feel it?
