Each morning my spirits fall as I scroll
through the news articles on my FB feed: travel restrictions on Muslims from
abroad, a scarily unqualified set of cabinet members, an oil spill in the
Dakotas, attempts to defund Planned Parenthood.
I feel distanced from all that’s happening in
my country. I feel powerless. I feel cold.
Of course, one silver lining of this awful
administration is that we’ve seen a surge in protest and political involvement.
People refuse to sit idly by as our nation and its values disintegrate around
them. I teared up scanning images from the Women’s March on Washington, reading
poetry from friends, and watching videos of the recent protests at airports
around the nation. Some paint this uproar and reaction as pointless
time-wasting from a group of petulant babies, and others say it’s a sign of the
power of the people. Both narratives force dynamic action into static
black-and-white paper cuttings, beautiful but flawed.
All of this political turmoil has me thinking
a lot about compassion.
This past October 2016, I had the privilege
to chaperone one of Woodstock’s Activity Week trips to Dharamshala, a small
city in Northern India. Though the bus ride was 14 hours of pure hell and my
anxiety at shepherding seniors around was distracting, the trip afforded us
some amazing opportunities.
One such opportunity was meeting His Holiness
the 14th Dalai Lama, and then hearing him address a group of Chinese pilgrims –
all of whom had to conceal their real reason for being in India due to the
tenuous relationship between Tibet and China.
This wasn’t my first time seeing HHDL speak;
he had addressed the Woodstock community several years ago. But I was again
reminded of what an amazing person and leader he is. HHDL has a certain
irrepressible spark and spirit. He glows with joy and love, even when he speaks
of the terrible ills in this world.
As many know, one of HHDL’s main messages is
to show compassion to all those around us. When we visited HHDL’s temple in
Dharamshala, I spent some time meditating on this idea a bit:
“He says we must live with compassion – not just
claim it as a belief, but actually make it true within our hearts. He asks a
lot of us.
It is easy indeed to think we are
compassionate people. But consider who it is we show our (often inconsistent)
compassion to: our family, our friends, our pets, our colleagues, those who
share our belief systems. How much harder it is to show compassion to those
beyond the small circles ringing our own private worlds…”
**
I had scrawled these notes in a small
notebook amid the clamor of other visitors and pilgrims, in a completely
different headspace than the one I occupy now. But my reflection seems to me
linked to a major problem in America these days: we’ve lost sight of
compassion.
The root of the word compassion, from compati, is “to suffer with” (Oxford
English Dictionary). It would be easy for me to demonize Trump and his
supporters by arguing that they don’t “suffer with” or have sympathy for those
in need. Indeed, some scholars, like George Lakoff, have divided the left and
the right into two camps: liberals who follow the nurturing parent model and
conservatives who follow the strict father model (Lakoff). Liberals, then,
might seem more compassionate than conservatives, more willing to support high
taxes and government welfare programs, to welcome refugees, to protect freedoms
for all people.
But this oversimplifies and skews the
narrative, and my summary of Lakoff’s research is another example of that.
Lakoff found that conservatives do feel they are showing compassion through a “tough
love” approach that they hope will allow citizens to build independence from
the government. Nothing is as simple as it seems.**
We all
must learn to feel the sufferings of one another, which are varied and
complicated but always there. As many political pundits have noted, Trump’s
base is full of people suffering from job / wage stagnation and a melting-away
of the values they hold dear.
I unfortunately don’t have any real
suggestions to solve the divisive politics in America, and at this point my
frustration with the Trump administration makes me want to fight its every
decision tooth and nail. However, it would be wise for us to remember HHDL’s
challenge and remain sensitive to the unique sufferings of those around us.
We’re all human, after all.
love, mel
PS -- If you'd like to see more photos from our trip, check out FB.
Works Cited
“Compassion.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University, 2017. En.oxforddictionaries.com,
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/compassion. Accessed 7 Feb. 2017.
Lakoff, George. “Metaphor, Morality, and
Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals in the Dust.” Social Research, vol. 62, no. 2, 1995. http://www.wwcd.org/issues/Lakoff.html.
Accessed 17 Feb. 2017. **Thanks to my poli sci-trained husband for his help
with Lakoff’s work!**
