Staring Down the Wrong
Good people of the world, wield your power to witness and hold them to their shame.
I would prefer to turn off the radio, not read the papers, not know what is happening in the world because it hurts to know. It literally hurts my heart, my gut to learn of children mistreated, endangered, exploited. To think of people risking everything and finding nowhere safe to try to go. It hurts to know these things. It hurts to imagine the suffering of others that happens all the time, all over the world, in unthinkable scale. And so it would be so nice to deny them. To believe the counter narrative so pervasive in our storytelling.
But denying it doesn’t save us from the suffering. And weaving a different version, where the suffering is deserved or at least a result of choice only ever thinly veils the truth. We can’t get away from the truth with storytelling. Not for long. And what does it cost us to try? What does it cost us to deny the humanity of others? To negotiate its value so we can sleep better? When we fall for the narratives that lead us away from suffering in the face of others’ suffering, away from compassion we lose our own humanity. And is that a worthy trade?
Yes, it hurts. To hear about children imprisoned in Madagascar for stealing vanilla. Children who still need their mothers. My children still need me. to think of them imprisoned, away from me, is agony. Children who have run from genocide only to find an over-crowded dead-end in which the neighbors don’t want them. My children are safe right now but what if they had to run and only found uncaring? Children who’ve risked a dangerous journey with their parents or separated from their parents because the prospect of life in their home country offered only violence and exploitation. The hope that sends them on this journey is humiliated at its end. I imagine I would be deeply broken-spirited and don’t know how i’d soften this for my children. Mothers lose children to war or famine or illness. Boys are exploited for the efforts of unwinable war. Girls exploited for the perpetuation of institutional misogyny. It all hurts to know. Because what if it were us?
But denying it, looking away, turning it off is part of the engine of this force. Denying it allows this dark aspect of humanity to continue its efforts without shame. To habitually turn it off, to deny it, to believe the storytelling that softens the blow or whitewashes to ease digestion is the same as allowing. It’s the role we play in the darkness. The darkness counts on us to play this. We are pawns.
Paradoxically, in order to be the light, to change the impact of this force, we have to look and keep our attention there. We have to care. Because if we look closely at the actions of offenders, if we look and feel the suffering they cause, if we ask ourselves, what if that were us?, if we feel the horror and then look back at those responsible with our own suffering in our eyes, our own horror then they can not continue to perpetrate without owning the shame that belongs to them.
The children imprisoned or trafficked, the desperate people fleeing violence, the unjustly and inhumanely incarcerated could just as easily be us. It’s the turning of a few short tides that separates our experience of ease, of time to write, of time to read, of time to “make good choices,” time to stop at Starbucks from the experience of people who would find all that unthinkably frivolous because.. survival. It’s the tantrums and greed of a few fragile egos that could change the world our children will know into one we turn away from knowing now. And how will it feel to be ignored or have our story whitewashed so others don’t need to suffer in knowing about us? How will that feel?
The only hope we have is in caring. We have to care. We have to care about those who suffer. We have to be courageous and know about those who suffer. We have to stare down the suffering so we can stare down those who perpetrate, propagate and allow it. Stare down what’s hard to see and feel the pain of it so we can do something about it for them and for us. We can stop this if we’re willing to know about it and feel about it. If we care, those quiet soldiers of harm will have to own the shame they feel anyway. No one causes harm or protects harmful systems without moral injury, without shame but just as we try not to feel the suffering of compassion, they try not to feel the shame. It’s all this not feeling that is allowing horrors to unfold inside entire cultures and inside the bodymindspirits of individual, ordinary people. We’re all suffering anyway. We may as well suffer from compassion.
When shame is earned by our actions it is instructive. It tells us we’ve veered off the path of shared humanity but, if felt, it offers us a path back. The path back is compassion. Any suffering can be transformed into compassion which immediately connects us back to humanity. It will take our courageous witnessing to change the world. We have to be willing to suffer in the way of compassion or we will suffer in the way of shame and regret. We don’t get away without suffering in this life. But suffering with others is a far superior path to suffering from shame alone and in secret. We have to choose how we suffer because we don’t get to choose whether we will.
Compassion, the willingness to see and feel the suffering of another and the sincere desire to help ease it. Compassion changes everything it touches. It cuts through insincere storytelling, it opens up space, it brings the sufferer and the compassionate into the now where a small change can alter the trajectory of a life. It’s the single most important aspect of our humanity. Because, without it, we hurl ourselves into the insatiable chaos of self-interest. We will continue to plow forward with insatiable aims like profit, protection and power, of which there will never be enough and the disciplined pursuit of it will necessarily require we exploit and exclude a growing number of others. We will carry large bank accounts, arsenals and huge followings but moral injury which we will try but fail to outrun. We will never be happy.
Unless we are compassionate, able to see and care about the suffering in this world. Able to stare down the systems that allow it, to stare down the people who support the systems that allow it so they feel their own shame. And if they feel that. We can have compassion for that too. And we can offer them that little moment where a compassionate recognition of suffering can alter the trajectory of a life, of a culture. If we are willing to be compassionate, to suffer with, they can feel the shame that can transform them.
We have to be willing to know about it. We have to look at it clearly, no storytelling. We have to care. It’s our only hope.
