Compassion Is the Answer

Our world is in a serious state of compassionate deficiency - affecting people, animals and the environment. But apparently the consequences don't matter, because they aren't affecting you. Our world is stuck in the mindset that if we have neither seen nor eaten a strawberry in our life, that strawberries therefore must not exist (despite the clear evidence that they in fact do).

Many people argue that they are compassionate beings, that they are aware of and empathise with the feelings of other living things. However, this is where empathy and compassion are different. To be compassionate, these empathetic feelings going on inside your head must coincide with the feeling to do something about it - there is no use, for example, feeling empathetic towards someone who is about to get hit by a car, then not actually taking any action to warn them about it.

I think our lack of compassion is driven less so by hate and more so by plain indifference - and I am definitely guilty of this. When hearing facts such as 795 million people don't have enough food to live a normal life, or that our worlds land ice is decreasing by 281 gigatonnes every year, initially I am concerned. But within hours, if not minutes, these facts have been disregarded and I have entered a sense of indifference. When I take some time to revisit and process issues such as these, I am disappointed in myself for not having the startling truths on my mind 24/7, and for going about my day worrying about stupid problems such as my phone battery draining every time I use Snapchat.

However, I do not believe we are instinctively indifferent about our worlds biggest issues, but that we are struggling to process the connection between the statistical numbers and their reality. 795 million people is the same as the whole population of New Zealand being multiplied by about 172 and then left hungry (Fun Fact: 70% of US's grain is being fed to farmed animals, which is enough to feed 800 million people). 1 gigatonne of ice is equal to 1 billion tonnes - that means 281 billion tonnes of land ice is melting per year. This statistic is clear evidence that our world temperatures are rising, yet many still believe global warming is a hoax because they live in a country that hasn't been outwardly affected by it yet, or because it just so happens to be a chilly day in their neck of the woods. Our lack of connection to numbers is driving our indifference, which is driving our overall lack of compassion to the world around us. I can't help wonder if the media is partially to blame for this? Because I know for sure there was no trouble connecting numbers with their reality after the Paris attacks in 2015. If concern for issues were being more highly publicised, concern would be normalised by the public because the public always has, and always will, mimic the media.

In my opinion, indifference is worse than hate - and our current worlds incapability to process situations that don't affect us directly will eventually bring us to our doom. Although it is really important to be aware of the consequences brought on by our indifference and lack of compassion, in order to make a change we must draw our thoughts away from what we lack and focus on what we want. We attract what we think about, so if we focus on what is written below we will begin to attract more compassion within ourselves and eventually around us, whereas if we continue to focus about our growing indifference and absence of compassion, we will only be attracting more.

We want to be surrounded by compassion because it will 

reduce judgement towards those in our community 

We want to be surrounded by compassion because there will be more equity for minority groups 

We want to be surrounded by compassion because families struggling to make ends meet in our own country could have a brighter future. 

We want to be surrounded by compassion because animals will no longer be bred and raised with their sole purpose being to satisfy the greed of people. 

We want to be surrounded by compassion because Syrian children could grow up the risk of being bombed. 

We want to be surrounded by compassion because future generations need a safe planet just as much as we do. 

We want to be surrounded by compassion because it is the beginning of the answer.

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