Restoring Compassion

MY TENDENCY, as I age into senior citizen status, has been towards misanthropy.The older I get, the less I like people. As a child, I was shy, but nice, and I had friends. My shyness dissapated by the time I reached high school,and I evolved into a gregarious, loquacious entity. I was popular in high school. I remember when I was about twenty, a friend said to me: "hell, you like every body". And so I did. The same friend said to me: you are always ridiculing people, putting people down.". I had that tendency too. The seeds of my later misanthropy, perhaps. People are complicated. I have thought and said often in recent years that I prefer dogs and cats to people and, in truth, I think that is true. A fairly high percentage of people say the same thing. Mark Twain's quote: "The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog", I have quoted often. The election of Trump, the various wars, all have combined to enhance my contempt for humanity. When I was a child I believed that war, faminine, and all that would be vanquished by the time I reached adulthood, or by the end of the twentieth century. Similarly, when Armstrong set foot on the moon when I was fourteen, I assumed that by the year 2000 astronauts would walk on Mars, and colonies would be built on the moon and Mars. The optimism of my youth faded, and soured into cynicism. I first heard about climate change, global warming, in 1988, when NASA scientist James Hanson testified about it in Congress, I was in my early thirties, an that spurred my encroaching cynicism. "Of our cities shall remain but the wind that blew through them", wrote Bertolt Brecht. And then, today, I saw a picture of two starving children, in Africa. A young boy, perhaps barely a teenager, is standing, his face fixed in a grimance. he himself is underweight, and he is holding another child, a little boy anywhere from two to four years old, thd child's legs wrapped around the boy's waist, his arms around the boy's neck, his tiny baby head buried in his older brother's shoulder, hiding, seeking some small measure of love and comfort, giving up. His tiny arms and legs nothing, literally, but skin and bone. Sticks covered with drawn, taut skin. The tiny tot was either dead, or very near it, certainly nearly beyond recovery. The older boy is giving what comfort and love he can to his dying younger sibling. Never in my sixty nine year long life have I been as impacted by a photograph. Never have I been so schocked, so filled with sudden despair, so truly heartbroken. The image of it reamins in me, and shaall remain in me until my dying day. I have no idea wht to do about it, other than to make a donation to the Red Cross, a food bank, some international food fund. I've done that before. Is a start. I like to brag about the number of times I have donated blood. To comfort myself that I am, after all, a decent person? This image will not let me go. It will never leave me. I am grateful that I didn't see it when I was younger. Haven't I seen similar picures before? Surely I have. I can't remebmer any of them. I try to comfort myself by reminding myself that each year there is more than enough food grown and produced in the world to feed everyone, every living person. That brings hope, but also anger, anger at the stupid inefficiencies of our tangled, greedy economic and political systems. The hope is the knowledge that it is not impossible to save ourselves, to save ourselves form our own folly. What purpose does my misanthropy serve, confronted with this? "Noble be man, compassionate, and good", said Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, perhpas the most intelligent man who ever lived, perhaps the wisest, perhaps the greatest writer. "Dark, dark, my light, and darker my desire. My soul, like some heat maddened summer fly, keeps buzzing at the sill. which I is I?" wrote Theodore Roethke. Maybe now I can answer this question, drag myself up and out of my emotional abyss. If thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee, Nietzche remnds us. I shall stare no longer. I shall reach down into myself, deep down, and find within myself my last vestage of love of humanity, and I shall nurture it, and let it grow, for it is there, awaiting a rebirth. I shall let the words of Goethe inspire and sustain me. My despair illuminates my compassion. "In a dark time, the eye begins to see", said Roethke.I shall gather myself together, and use myself for good. I will produce. Man, compassionate, and good.