Compassion, in it purest from, requires a person to step out side of their selfishness and experience the emotions of someone else. Real compassion is achievable only though openness. To feel genuine compassion, a person must transfer himself into another, walk around in their skin, and try to see the world through their eyes. Compassion, in this sense, is an intensely personal experience with another person. Through the eyes of another, we can understand their world and sympathize with the choices they make. Compassion, at least in my young eyes, is in rapid decline. Most people are so self-absorbed they avoid anything that extends beyond the self.

We are a nation of consumers that have an insatiable desire to express ourselves through the items we buy. Corporations encourage people to display their individuality through their purchases. Sociologists label us the ‘Me Generation’ as we tend to forget that our consumerism, our plastic self-expression, affects other people across the planet. We consume without compassion.

(This picture is from an anti-consumerism magazine called Adbusters. It generally takes hard-line stances against the unsustainable path we are currently on.)

This consumption is not sustainable. As the picture above sarcastically emulates, there is a war against consumption in this country, we just do not know it yet. As the planet’s population exponentially increases, and our appetite for goods expands, the resources of the planet are rapidly disappearing. Yet, most people do not see the endgame of the path which we are presently on.

As Hopkins so poignantly noted when observing the Oxford scenery, “O if we only knew what we do when we delve or hew.” Hopkins poem poignantly illustrates the consumption predicament by noting the gradual destruction of the 'tender' country. This theme was important to Hopkins as he touches on it again in his tragic vision, “To his selfbent so bound, so tied to his turn. To thriftless reave our rich round world bare.” Hopkins, over a century ago, noted man’s selfishness and cocern for greed

People are so lost in themselves, in their next purchase – how will the new 62-inch plasma look in my guest bedroom? Does the redness of my razor phone define my personality? Do I look better in a blue roadster or should I go with a pink one? – So lost in they justify their self-centeredness.

(These Chinese 12-13 year olds work 16 hours a day for less than 30 cents an hour. What does the world look like through their eyes?)

We import slave labor products from all over the world and buy them up in massive amounts because they are cheap and accessible. However, we rarely ever stop to think about the people that produce the products. We justify our purchases with a number of poor excuses: I don’t know anyone in China, I can’t make a difference, I didn’t force anyone into slavery, I am just a consumer, I buy this stuff because it help poor people get jobs. I! I! I! As Jude said to Sue as she rattled off a list of faulty moral justifications, “"Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!"

(Thousand of causes, why should I care?)

Beyond all of the personal justifications people use to explain way their guilt, a new term emerged to explain human indifference. Compassion fatigue is a term coined in the late 60’s to explain the apathy that blankets our modern society. People, the argument goes, constantly bombarded with the pain and suffering of others. The inundation of images of suffering people across the word does not appeal to people as it once did. As the picture above demonstrates, there so many organizations that beg for our compassion, the process has worn people out.

(Compassion fatigue has become a popular modern excuse to justify apathy[5])

I will argue that people have not suffered compassion fatigue, rather that the organizations do not understand the required interpersonal relationship to establish true compassion. If I receive a request for money to help a crisis, I rarely respond. However, if the organization that seeks me shows me the personal nature of a crisis, through the eyes of another, it cultivates my compassion.

I believe that seeing a problem through the eyes of another person is a powerful tool that is underutilized in today world. Somehow, the technology mediums of today have depersonalized world problems. With everyone so wrapped up in themselves, you have to individualize messages to get through to people.

http://www.shannonburns.net/images/26-consumption.jpg

Hopkins’s Oxford, II: “Binsey Poplars” (Austin: Jenn’s, 2008), 635

http://www.goiam.org/uploadedImages/Pick_A_Fight/China_Trade/7589321.jpg

Hardy, Thomas “Jude the Obscure” Norton Critical Edition pg. 278

http://www.cartoonstock.com/directory/c/compassion.asp