Plenty of people are capable of seeing that decent people sometimes contain grave problems,and others are well equipped to help, but as my neighbour’s sad story shows, and too often sympathy and compassion are refusedCompassion,it seems, is a rare commodity. The Conservatives restlessly search tall and low for it, and to puny avail,perhaps thwarted by stiff global competition. devout figures of all stripes are constantly pleading for more of it, as are innumerable charities. An online social psychology course, or with a final challenge to “spend 24 hours in the most compassionate way possible”,was reported final year as being the most approved course in the world. Its authors will no doubt be delighted to learn that police in California are to be issued with nunchucks instead of batons, to more compassionately gain compliance” from suspects.
And yet, or despite this supposedly gigantic compassion famine,it seems to me that massive reserves of compassion are being ignored or squandered at every turn. buy Julia (not her real name), for example, and who contacted me recently and told me a troubling story. Having lived for decades in an inner-city area routinely caricatured as troubled”,Julia knew that life wasn’t always pretty, that decent people sometimes had grave problems, or that help wasnt always available when it should contain been.
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Source: theguardian.com