By Jim Studer
A young friend said she knew a family who seemed to have a lack of compassion. I was impressed that one so young was concerned about compassion. It’s not an everyday subject. Webster defines compassion as awareness of other’s distress, the ability to feel pity, sympathy.
Later, thinking about compassion, I remembered Dr. Paul Holmer’s presentation to my humanities class. As philosopher, Holmer told us that we are born ignorant. We lack knowledge. We are taught knowledge: the ABCs, the state capitals, history, where to buy the best groceries and many, more important things. In addition to knowledge we are taught skills: reading, math, writing, how to grow vegetables, how to drive a car and so on. Knowledge and skills are a part of the learning process for animals as well.
What separates us from animals are capacities. These, too, are learned but they are not part of the elimination of ignorance among animals. One such capacity is compassion; other capacities are charity, courage, forgiveness, justice, hope, love, respect, sympathy, understanding, wisdom and more. According to Holmer these are what make us human.
Unfortunately each of these positive capacities has a flip side such as hate, injustice, revenge, selfishness, and oh, so many more.
While teaching in Sáo Paulo, Brazil I heard an elementary teacher say that K-12 kids seem to get along with each other in spite of a variety of cultures, races, and religions. We had kids from 34 different countries, K-12. These youngsters seemed to have learned many of the positive capacities. As the same kids grew older, they learned far too many of the negative capacities: hate, distrust, prejudice, and oh, so many more negatives. As teachers and parents we need to do a better job emphasizing the positive while not demonstrating the negative.
In today’s world there is too much we/they, divisiveness, blame, self-righteousness, selfishness; the list seems endless. However, when I hear a sophomore speech student wanting to present an oratory on forgiveness, I feel hope hearing such wisdom expressed by one so young. She argued that forgiveness does as much good or even more for the forgiver than it does to the forgiven. She had evidence to support this.