Compassion lost

A man drunk or hurt is sleeping on the side of the road in many parts of your city, vehicles are screeching by and the dust is slowly blanketing this poor soul. People walk by without a turn of their heads. 

 An elderly gentleman is returning home after a day out in the city, he looks tired, the heat has taken its toll on his shirt and he is barely hanging on in the bus. The bus is full, young men are seated, the elderly gentleman looks towards those seated with a hint of enquiry in his eyes but there is no response. He takes a deep breath, the bus slows down at a stop and some passengers get down. He hopes to get a seat, but a younger stronger and faster man pushes him aside in his scurry towards the seat and he is left standing. 

An old lady trudges along the street with two heavy bags in each hand, attempting to cross the road at a busy traffic intersection. She could really use a hand carrying her heavy bag; she could use a hand crossing the road. The younger people walk past her; she remains unseen in the crowds. She takes a deep breath and simply moves on slower than before. 

A vegetable seller is trying to navigate through peak traffic; he could use a push or two to make it through the next 200 meters of hellish traffic. He slows down and rests to catch his breath, a honking SUV startles him, the driver of the vehicle points at him and yells out something which is probably offensive. He has no strength to say anything to the driver or the countless other people who honk and force their way past him, he just wants to get home before its too late, and he still has a few kilometers to go. 

To say that there is no compassion left in this world would be wrong, but we could always do with some more. As a matter of fact, compassion is a much needed virtue that we must all learn to cultivate. Today’s world exists in shambles torn up by our indiscriminate lust for more but it is all avoidable if we are just compassionate with each other. The world that we are carving out in competition against one another is forcing us to become cruel and we mask that cruelty of ours with indifference. This indifference towards the blood of another and the sweat of another has made our life tasteless in many ways and yet we turn away from it and assign a higher priority to our own needs and comforts. If we can’t be compassionate to another human being’s suffering then that is the greatest failure there is. 

Compassion is a very strong human emotion and a very essential one at that. Without compassion human beings may even cease to exist as it is essential that we exist in harmony with all that is around us, any other path that excludes compassion will lead to a world nothing short of a dystopian world where suffering goes on unnoticed. The ability of human beings to empathize with the suffering of other beings is what makes us special, it is what makes our world special in so many ways. By being compassionate we are in fact promoting a universal interdependency that really binds us all together as one.