Logical Anesthesia

The students spanned the room at Detroit's Mariner’s Inn, the room that served as cafeteria at meal times, its only view the parking lot and the road going by, the road that seemed to go nowhere except to more old buildings in a worn out part of the city, a part so unfit for habitation that it was left to the poor and homeless, like the arid western deserts were left to the Indians.  Usually the people who filled this room were the guests of the place, whose faces seemed as inert as the buildings, whose clothes were the color of the asphalt and cinderblock and brick and rust. 

But these 50 young people seemed to radiate the sky, and growing things, and hiphopness and groovyness and withitness as they had shuffled into the room, settled around tables in groups that adjusted to the somber setting by silent glances and smiles, their bleary eyes and tousled hair suggesting that they had rolled in from whatever gym floor they had slept on that night.  They were spending this week of their Spring Break in the city that their Wayne State University inhabits, not on campus, but in the deeper, older, more wounded parts.  They were spending their days doing service projects with agencies involved with crime and blight, art and education, and hunger and homelessness.  And I had invited them to spread out across the room, “taking a stand” on an imaginary line.

The line stretched across the length of the room.  At one end of it was “I‘ll be fine.”  At the other end was “I‘ll never make it.”  They had been asked to listen to a scenario in which they found themselves homeless, like the people they were trying to help.  They were asked to take a place on the line according to their belief in their chances for survival now that they were homeless.  A panel of good people who work with the homeless every day asked them why they had chosen to stand where they were, those who seemed confident and those who were doubtful.  Talk became deep and reverent as the students felt their roles more and more clearly with the help and prodding of the panel.  Some students wept as they began to feel the injustice of social abandonment and hopelessness as their own. 

Their tears were tears of compassion and understanding, and their questions to the panelists were noble and authentic.  I pointed to a small girl with straight blond hair and a pained look.  As soon as she began to speak, her tears came, and she had to pause in order to collect her words.  “I don’t feel anything!”  Her words surprised us all, stunned us, paralyzed us so that she had to say them again.  “I don’t feel how you feel; I don’t care like you all care.”  We knew that a story was coming.  She told of her parents coming to the U.S. from Poland, “with nothing but two hundred dollars and her older brother who was six months old.”  If they could make it, she asked, why couldn’t these people on the street?

Her argument was valid, and prompted logical discussion of immigrant courage and will versus multigenerational poverty and the vestiges of slavery.  But as the sensible discussion was going on, her tears kept silently falling.  Her face spoke a tacit truth: she was denied something that others in the room had; she was on the outside of compassion looking in.  She could clearly see what others saw here in this city of theirs.  But she was denied feeling in her heart because her head explained away the people she saw, gave her reasons that shielded her from feeling their pain.  She had been taught by the words and example of immigrant parents that this is a land of opportunity, that anyone who wants to work can, that anyone who works hard can do well. 

So a poor person is lazy; their situation is their own damned fault.  Why do they have to stand there on the sidewalk; why don’t they go and get a job?  In Jesus’ time, a blind person had been cursed for their sin, or the sin of their parents.  Here in this room, the little Polish girl was out of place in a society of compassionate peers.  Jesus was out of place in a society of judging peers, but his tears were not from confusion, but compassion.

Gray’s see-feel-help-change "Good Samaritan" model for becoming our most human selves can break down because we avert our eyes or isolate ourselves from the worn parts of our society, the worn people.  It can also break down because when we see, we toss up a wall of logic that explains away the pain of others, justifies our not sharing it, so we don’t have to feel it.

We don’t run the race.  We run in place.

Tomorrow – compassion fatigue

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.