Paul Sassone

Are we becoming less compassionate, less able to feel for the other guy?

That certainly would seem the case, politically speaking. Take for example our governor’s  indifference to funding vital education and social services.

But what about us as individuals?

Are we less compassionate?

I think I might be. And that worries me.

Hoverboards, for example. We all know none of them are safe. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) tells us so — “Consumers risk serious injury or death if their self-balancing scooters ignite and burn.”

From Dec. 1 through Feb. 17, CPSC reports, there have been 52 reported hoverboard fires causing $2 million in damage.

This danger doesn’t even count all the people suffering sprains, broken bones and head injuries when falling off the tricky contraptions.

Whenever a hoverboard bursts into flame it is reported on the news. My reaction should be — That’s awful. I am glad nobody was hurt.

But increasingly I find myself saying — Everybody knows hoverboards are dangerous. So why do you still have one in your house? There wouldn’t have been a fire if you had paid attention to the warnings and not bought a hoverboard in the first place.

And hoverboards are expensive — anywhere between $150 and $600. Too many people with too much time and money on their hands, I grouch.

And I’ve become more cranky and less compassionate when I watch reports of rescues on the news. You know, the frequent reports of a trapped skier who shushed into an out-of-bounds area, the hiker who wandered into a plainly marked dangerous area, the boater who got drunk and fell into the water.

Instead of feeling happy and relieved that these folks were saved, I find myself crabbing about all the trouble and expense to extricate them from situations they shouldn’t have been in in the first place.

This is not a good way to be.

But I don’t think I am alone in feeling this way, in being less compassionate.

Perhaps this diminishment of our capacity to feel for the other guy partially accounts for the rise in the politics of selfishness, which may account for the success of such politicians as Bruce Rauner,

Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and their ilk, who appeal to our selfishness, who seek to make selfishness and exclusion respectable.

But selfishness and exclusion aren’t respectable. Neither is blaming victims, which is part of it, and of which I, alas, am guilty.

I am going to work on that.

We all ought to work on that.

Worrying about the other guy’s problems and can we help will make all
of us better citizens, better people.

–We all need to work on being more compassionate–