theunitofcaring: This post and the responses...

Monday, June 12, 2017

This post and the responses really get me thinking about how much power there sometimes is in just saying ‘oh my god, oh my god, that’s not okay, that’s so fucked up, I am so sorry that is happening to you’.
Like, partially because it’s a sign that someone will actually help; if they treat a situation as routine and uninteresting you can’t expect them to exert themselves to change it. But also even if they have absolutely no power to help, or if helping requires costly tradeoffs against lots of other things, it can be tremendously powerful just because everyone quietly acting like things are okay is exhausting and leaves you doubting yourself and feeling guilty over being so terrified or so upset over something that no one else thinks is important.
I’ve never really understood the Christian parable about abandoning the whole flock to save one lost sheep. I’ve been in communities with people who will abandon their path to pour themselves into one desperate need, and it usually doesn’t work; it usually ends with burnout and stress and misery and no one rescued. It’s that tendency which makes the advice ‘don’t light yourself on fire to keep someone else warm’ and ‘put on your own oxygen mask before helping others’ so desperately needed even though they’re so often repeated.
But there’s an interpretation that sort of works for me - not ‘if you have a whole flock of stable and functional relationships, and one person you care about is in desperate need, go after them and neglect the rest’ but ‘when someone is in desperate need, that is not okay and should not be’ -
- then I get it. It’s not ‘do everything for the greatest need, at the expense of everyone else’, it’s ‘when you look at horrible injustice and horrible mistreatment and big problems, say ‘gaaaaaaahhhh!’ Don’t try too hard to bring your empathy in line with your capacity to act; even when there is nothing you can do but yell ‘gaaaaaaaahhhh’, yelling ‘gaaaaahhh!’ matters more than you think.’
And maybe in some cases, for some people, it’s the practice of extending that righteous anger, that horror, that ‘no this isn’t right it isn’t okay it should not be’, which helps you later to make hard tradeoffs correctly, which helps you avoid the mistake of discounting or ignoring suffering because you can’t deal with it and then failing to take it seriously enough even when you can deal with it.