If
you were writing a lament for your city, what items might appear in
the verses? (Serendipity Bible 10th Anniversary Edition, page
1188).
My
country embodies a bifurcation of compassion based upon a sense of
what is appropriate. On a face-to-face person-to-person basis
Americans are one of the most compassionate people on earth. This is
based upon a sense of what is appropriate for this level of
intercourse. The other day my brother and I were riding down 34th
street and noticed that someone had collapsed on the sidewalk. We
parked and ran across the street. By the time we got there, people
were already calling in to 911 and several people surrounded the
person, one had their hand under the person’s head and was talking
to the victim in an attempt to bring her out of unconsciousness. In
such situations no one seems to question whether it is appropriate or
not to express compassion or indeed how to express it.
Once
this intimacy is lost, however, Americans tend to fear the exercise
of compassion and see it as inappropriate and even dangerous as an
influencer and determiner of public policy, finding it fraught with
difficulties. Public policy, it is deemed, should not be based upon
intimately sourced compassion, but upon individual responsibility and a desire to
underwrite it rather than indulge in public largess. Here compassion,
it is held, still exists; but in a different form—one appropriate for the
occasion. This form holds that it uncompassionate for public policy
to encourage inordinate dependency which can lead directly to abject
subservience. Thus American politics is often conflicted as
compassion is employed to encourage self-sufficiency—a stance that on the surface can appear contradictory due to short-term necessity
vis-à-vis long-term objectives. An inordinate amount of debate
regarding public policy centers on whether or not a certain policy is
truly compassionate in the end-–whether it tends to build
self-sufficiency or subservience--an action ending in independence and health or leading to a
form of slavery.
My
lament is that life is not simpler and more direct, more intimate and
less complex and less fraught with unintended consequences, and much
less ripe for rationalization.
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