Evil Is Eroding Our Compassion
People understand what must be done but not why to do it
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by Mike Meyer ~ Honolulu ~ September 30, 2021
I, too, feel my compassion draining away as I watch people succumb to COVID by denying life-saving vaccines for themselves and others. In the first ten months of the pandemic, our traditional habit of blaming the victim was secondary to the suffering and death that we observed. There was little that any of us could do except feel compassion.
As the numbers rose, as in any disaster, we became numb to the suffering and death, but compassion remained despite the growing political manipulation to deny reality to gain power. It took a year to lose our awareness of the risks born by essential workers who kept things going without choice or, often, and healthcare.
For much of our planet’s population, that compassion should still be firm as so many are waiting with no date for the availability of vaccines, and actual deaths (as opposed to reported COVID deaths) pass 15 million or more. The privileged who were the first to be vaccinated have now lost their compassion as the unvaccinated are now a problem keeping the from a total return to some imagined normality.
The short-lived compassion in America has been replaced by the anti-vax populations suffering and dying to maintain the pandemic as political weapon
This produces a double blow against any compassion for those who have the privilege of denying a vaccine that is readily available but refuses it while billions wait. That is more than an absence of compassion and becomes actively evil.
While all modern morality places compassion at the top of what is good in humanity, we think of it as a single good. We don’t think of its dyadic opposite. Compassion and empathy positively embrace all life to limit suffering and death. Conversely, evil ignores suffering and death for others who are considered of lesser importance and, in America, deserving of whatever befalls them.
We have removed the concept of evil from our minds as a remnant of religions that are no longer valid. Our maturation away from the brutal mythologies that are the foundation of the once-unquestioned religions is one of the most outstanding…
