While I’ve seen many disturbing things the last six months (“secret” highway building, etc.), I think nothing has been as disturbing as the growing lack of compassion I have seen in family and friends.
?!? What the #$%^? has been my reaction to this.
The times are scary, so I can see why when one is worried about finances, sure, one tends to worry about oneself first. And as far as I can tell everyone is worried about finances: falling house values, losing equity loans, losing money in the stock market, lay offs, worries about one’s job, less ready cash to spend, foreclosures, extremely high unemployment, paying more on your mortgage than your house is now worth, rising rents, shrinking pensions, store closures, bank bailouts, the new homeless, etc., etc.
BUT IT IS HAPPENING TO EVERYONE. It is not just YOUR worry – it is happening to everyone. In other words, we are all in this together.
So you would think there would be compassion for those in need, for those laid off, for those foreclosed on, for those on the brink. Only that is not what, on the whole, I have been seeing. I’ve seen fear, yes. I’ve seen anxiety, yes. I’ve seen busyness, yes. I’ve seen obliviousness, yes. It is like people are trodding down their same old paths and trying very hard to ignore what is going on. Pretending things will be okay. Pretending it is only happening to “them.” Not here, not right now to me, not to us. I’m okay, we’re okay. Sure, we lost (fill in the blank), but we are hanging in there. Okay, I made some mistakes, but I am recovering. Or I have a plan for recovery.
Seeing what is happening as a personal misfortune or misstep may be partly why there is an increasing lack of compassion. If you don’t see it as happening to all of us, if you don’t see it as all of us being in this together, then it’s a us-them situation.
So many people are one paycheck away from disaster. So many people WERE one paycheck away from disaster. They are now in the disaster area.
Two examples.
I go to a church that is big on compassion, right wingers call us secular humanists, but we are big on compassion. At a luncheon about four months ago, a group of us got together that had once been in a bi-monthly discussion group. A woman, there, older, was complaining about the homeless woman that was sleeping in her yard now and then. I had always seen this older woman as compassionate, but now, no, she wasn’t. She was more worried about the inconvenience, than having any concern about the woman. Somehow the homeless woman had lost her job and then her apartment, and she wanted to stay in the area, so she could visit her mother who was in a local nursing home. The older woman could have directed the homeless woman to local social services, a local non-profit that helps the homeless, our church, anything. Instead, she wanted her out of her yard and refused to talk to her.
Okay, maybe, bottom line it was fear. The older woman lives on a fixed income. But she has two sons that help her out, so she is not likely to become homeless herself. Although the fear could be there.
Her lack of compassion astounded me. So I directed the conversation about what could be done for the homeless woman. Others piped in.
The next instance was another woman at my church, again, older. She wanted to start a class on sustainability for our environmental group. Then she decided against it, because it was really about living within your income and she saw most of our church members as being too well off to care. I had a discussion with her after church one day, and we discussed all the foreclosures and she said it was people’s attitude toward money that had gotten them into trouble. That SHE’D always stayed within her income and others SHOULD too. I was rather astounded at her lack of compassion too.
There is some truth what she said. On the other hand, I am sure lots of people who were foreclosed on were one paycheck away from disaster. Then they lost their jobs and disaster hit – they could no longer pay their bills, including their mortgage.
According to recent government figures there are currently 10 million unemployed in the US.
10 MILLION, 10 MILLION, 10 MILLION.
That makes me blink. Does that make you blink?
Can’t we do better than “blaming the victim?” The victim of circumstances beyond their control? Of massive shiftings in the national/global financial world that seem beyond anyone’s individual control? (See above for the long list.)
We do seem to all be in this together.
So I say, let’s bring back compassion.
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