With Compassion
"Why do they hate us?"
It was the question everyone asked in the wake of terror. How could those Islamic radicals, those foreign devils, those wretched others hate us so much?
Bush America answered: They hate us because of our freedom. They covet our success and wealth; they envy our power and greatness. The hate us enough to lash out in the most horrific ways, destroying thousands of innocent lives, because we stand as the global paragon of the good, so wonderfully good that we bestir their vile, incipient evil.
Well. It was an answer that ignored history, forswore geopolitical issues and forces, and neatly elided any responsibility for prior American actions. Bush America flatly avoided all notions of cause and effect--it was simply unthinkable that the terrorists may have inflicted suffering on us because we inflicted suffering on them, that their hatred for us only mirrored the undisguised loathing too many Americans, and especially those in power, had for the people of the Middle East and the religion of Islam. Most Americans never grasped the most obvious answer: they hate us because we have shown such hateful disregard for them.
A much better question to have asked on September 12, 2001 would have been: What were the unaddressed needs of the terrorists? What humiliations, injuries, and privations had they experienced, so dire and so long ignored, that could drive them to such deplorable depths? Not, why did they treat us so demonically, but, what inner demons, born in desperation and need, caused them to act as they did?
I can hear the howls of Bush Americans: What pansy questions! Who cares what such miscreants were thinking or feeling? Who gives a fig about their decrepit little lives? Evil is as evil does, and the evildoers of 9/11 need to be stamped out and humiliated, not understood, but destroyed with an unambiguous ferocity and well-armed righteousness that will dissuade any wanna-be terrorists before they ever get started on their evil ways.
This defines the moment of truth in all our conflicts, personal and political, petty and profound: either we feel a pressing concern for the unmet needs that motivate all parties in a conflict, including and especially our adversaries, or we forcefully reject any concerns whatsoever for the feelings and opinions of others. We either care, with urgent persistence, or we could not care less.
We either feel compassion for everyone caught up in the pain and suffering of human conflict, or we restrict any such feelings to ourselves and our own, if indeed we feel at all.
Compassion combines an empathic awareness of others' distress with a compelling desire to provide aid and assistance. We feel another's pain and we feel obliged to help alleviate it. When we approach a conflict in the spirit of compassion, we look especially for the unanswered needs that underlie and propel human aggression, force, and violence. We realize that people in desperate need invariably resort to desperate measures, that all of the aggression, force, and violence in our world stems from desperation borne out of prior injustices left unresolved.
Compassion opens us to a more positive and inspiring human story. To the extent that we nurture our innate capacity for compassion, we look to and mostly see the basic good in all people. Compassion reveals others at their best, while rendering their lesser qualities and worst behaviors both understandable and transformable. Compassion lifts us from the hurt-hurt, lose-lose damnable logic of war-think into the win-win, conflict-resolving blessing of peace-think.
Should we continue to act without compassion--aggressively slaking our private needs with little thought or concern for the needs of others--we doom our world to the downward spiral of perpetual war. When, instead, even one individual chooses to listen carefully, to speak respectfully, to reach out empathically, and to extend the olive branch of compassionate concern to the "enemy," then the potent seeds of a profound planetary shift have been well planted.
