The Sum Of Compassion

I’ve had this idea come up in odd places lately, even among vegans, that there is only so much compassion our hearts can hold. Non-vegans sometimes ask how I can give so much compassion to animals when so many people are suffering. The underlying assumption here is that any love or caring we give to one being steals it from another. I find this concept completely false, in fact, much like the cliché “if you want to see something done ask a busy person to do it” I think that people who care tend to expand their caring. Our hearts can actually hold a great deal.

This is not to say that I expect someone working in the trenches to care for orphans in Africa to also start campaigning for animal rights. What I mean is that caring for the plight of children doesn’t preclude them from having concern for animals as well. In fact many animal advocates have told me that they first learned about animal issues through “a back door.” By this I mean they didn’t consider animal issues, but through working on human issues they found that animal issues and human issues intersected. This is the case when women’s advocates find that abused women are sometimes reluctant to leave and go into shelters because they would have to leave their companion animals behind at the mercy of a violent and unstable person. This happens when people helping abused children find that the family’s dog was the first to bear the brunt of the abuse, and if someone had intervened then the child might not have been hurt. This happens when crime victims’ advocates discover that violent criminals often have histories of animal abuse. The connection is made when people fighting human hunger realize that we feed most of our grain and soy to farmed animals so the wealthy can eat steak every night while third world children starve. People attuned to the suffering in the eyes of a child may have a moment of realization when they see the same fear and pain in the eyes of an animal.

Caring is hard. To some extent we all have to build walls to protect ourselves. If I went to the store and really felt the type of agony that goes into each neatly plastic wrapped tray of chicken parts it would be unbearable. So I find ways to not see. It’s hard to figure out what our limits are. I try to continue to advocate for the enslaved birds who are slaughtered by the billions for human consumption, but there’s this ledge where if I absorb too much I’ll be left useless and silenced. Others build their walls at thinking of animals at all, because they want to continue eating them or because they fear knowing and feeling too much.

Some people insulate themselves completely and find little compassion even for other people. We all know these people. They’re probably the first ones to ask “how can you waste time being vegan? Why aren’t you helping children?” But when we look at them we don’t see much in the way of caring. Rather than somehow conserving their compassion by writing off animals, they’ve stunted their compassion. I don’t know many people who are overflowing with compassion and empathy in one area, but feel nothing in regard to other issues. I do know people who will say of another issue “Oooh, that’s terrible, that’s so sad, but I’m really working full time on this other issue.” But at least that’s an indication that it matters, that all suffering, all injustice matters.
My opinion on this is that love feeds love, empathy feeds empathy, caring leads to caring. Opening up our hearts helps those hearts to grow larger and hold more. Of course we must take care to avoid despair, to avoid burnout, and to extend the same empathy to ourselves that we give to others. But the flip side is that ignoring suffering in one place makes it easier to walk past it in another place. Bitterness breeds more bitterness. If people believe themselves to be limited in the amount of love they can feel, then they become limited.

I know I tell bad people stories here a lot, but maybe one more time this has relevance. Years ago I went to a fancy party. I lived in Mt. Pleasant at the time and got around by public transportation, and I loved that eclectic inner city mix I found there. This party was in a wealthy suburb and almost everyone attending was well off and lived in huge houses on wooded lots in an exclusive neighborhood. I was so out of place, in fact I no sooner had walked in the door than I got snarky comments on my clothes. “Did you wear a prom dress?” one woman asked with a smirk.

Anyway, during this party I ended up in conversation with a young woman about my age. Her complaint that she kept repeating was that her commute to work was awful; something a lot of people can sympathize with. But then she said that part of the problem with her commute was that she cut through a residential area and always wound up behind a special school bus that picked up disabled students. She described with annoyance how the school bus would stop, and then all traffic had to stop too, no passing a school bus. She said that the bus then slowly lowered a ramp, then the driver got out of the bus to slowly push a student in a wheel chair onto the ramp. The driver would slowly make sure the wheel chair was in the correct position and secure before going back into the bus. Then he would slowly raise the ramp back up, at a leisurely pace he’d help the student to a spot in the bus, and then finally let traffic past. A couple blocks later the whole process would repeat. This young woman commuter felt that the school bus should be required to wait until after rush hour to pick up the disabled students.

Now aside from the obvious solution to this problem: leave the house twenty minutes earlier, there’s another issue here. It’s about not thinking what it must be like to be a student who wants to go to school, but faces so many obstacles in doing so. I’m sure that student would love to take the regular bus, to dash up the step in a few seconds and grab a seat among all the other students. That’s not the hand he was dealt, and all it takes is trying to step into his shoes for a moment or two to lose the impatience. Just like all it takes is trying to step into the world of a chicken who never sees sunlight, who never moves freely, who never lives except packed so tight with other chickens that she can’t run or stretch her wings to know that our treatment of these birds is deeply wrong.

Maybe it’s just too easy to put on the blinders. If all we just think about ourselves then we don’t need to take on the emotional burden of caring. But once we open ourselves up to caring it can snowball, we find more empathy in ourselves than we thought possible.