Compassion Fatigue

“Facts are stubborn things.” – John Adams

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” – Flannery O’Connor

“Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” – Mark 10.14

Whenever a major jetliner crashes anywhere in the world, it inevitably sets off a worldwide media frenzy covering every aspect of the tragedy. I want you to imagine for a moment that you woke up this
morning to the following headline: “One Hundred Jetliners Crash, killing 26000.” Think of the pandemonium this would create across the world as heads of state, parliaments and congresses convened to grapple with the nature and causes of this tragedy. Think about the avalanche of media coverage that it would ignite around the globe as reporters shared the shocking news and tried to communicate its implications for the world. Air travel would no doubt grind to a halt as governments shut down the airlines and panicked air travellers cancelled their trips. The NTSB and perhaps the FBI, CIA, and local law enforcement equivalents would mobilise investigations and dedicate whatever manpower was required to understand what happened and to prevent it from happening again.

Now imagine that the very next day, one hundred more planes crashed – and one hundred more the next, and the next, and the next. It is unimaginable that something that terrible could ever happen.
But it did – and it does.

It happened today, and it happened yesterday. It will happen again tomorrow. But there was no media coverage. No heads of state, parliaments, or congresses stopped what they were doing to address the
crisis, and no investigations were launched. Yet, 26,575 children died yesterday of preventable causes related to their poverty, and it will happen again today and tomorrow and the day after that. Almost ten
million children will be dead in the course of a year. So why does the crash of a single plane dominate the front pages of newspapers across the world while the equivalent of one hundred planes crashing daily never reaches or ears? And even though we now have the awareness, the access and the ability to stop it, why have we chosen not to? Perhaps one reason is that these kids who are dying are not our kids, they’re someone else’s.

SOMEBODY ELSE’S KIDS

A few years ago the book `Compassion Fatigue’ by journalist Susan Moeller was published.

In it she quoted a shocking statement that she found often repeated in newsrooms around the country. In the news business, one dead fireman in Brooklyn is worth five English bobbies, who are worth fifty Arabs, who are worth five hundred Africans. What a terrible equation – terrible, but accurate. If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that we simply have less empathy for people of other cultures living in faraway countries than we do for Americans. Our compassion for others seems to be directly correlated to whether people are close to us socially, emotionally, culturally, racially, economically, and
geographically. But why do we distinguish the value of one human life from another? Why is it so easy to shut out the cries of these dying foreign children from our ears? In some ways, the reasons are obvious.

Let me give you a couple of illustrations. If you heard on the radio that thousands of children die each year in car accidents, it would likely strike you as sad, but I doubt you would become very emotional.
If instead you learned that your neighbour’s child just died in a car crash, it would hit much closer to home, and your emotional response would be much deeper. You would immediately want to respond – to comfort your neighbours and to come alongside them in their grief, helping in any way you could. But what if you learned that your own child had been killed? You would be devastated at the deepest possible level. It would be a life-shattering and profoundly personal tragedy for you, one that would forever after redefine you. For some reason we are wired in such a way that we can become almost indifferent to tragedies that are far away from us emotionally, socially, or geographically, but when the same tragedy happens to us or someone else close to us, everything changes.

Let me use a different example. If you read in the newspaper about hundreds of children dying of malnutrition in a famine in Africa, you might pause for a moment of genuine sadness – but wouldn’t you finally turn the page, read the sports section, check the tv listings, and go about your daily routine? But imagine for a moment that you somehow discovered one of those starving African children dying on your front doorstep the very next morning as you left for church? Would you not stop everything, pick up the child, and rush her to the emergency room, offering to pay whatever it might cost to save her life? You would almost certainly respond with urgency as one human being to another, and that faraway famine you had read about the night before would very suddenly become intensely personal. You see, our problem is that the plight of suffering children in a far-off land simply hasn’t gotten personal for us. We may hear about them with sorrow, but we haven’t really been able to look at them as if they were our own children. If we could, then we would surely grieve more deeply in our spirits. We would weep for their parents, and we would respond with far greater urgency.

How might God think about this issue? Does HE look at the suffering of a child in Cambodia or Malawi with a certain sense of emotional distance? Does God have different levels of compassion for children based , their nationality, their race – or their parents’ income level? Does He forget about their pain because He is preoccupied with other things? Does He turn the offending page to read the sports
section – or is His heart broken because each child is precious to Him? God surely grieves and weeps, because every one of these children is His children – not somebody else’s.

I have to confess to you that I, too, struggle to mourn over these kids as if they were my own. Becoming the president of World Vision didn’t turn me into Teresa of Calcutta. It is altogether possible for me to do my job at World Vision with a sense of emotional detachment. I can sit in meetings all day, review financial statements, attend chapel at eleven o’ clock on Wednesdays, and even write a book about the poor, without my heart burning every moment with sadness. Like most Americans, I can get happily distracted by the details of my own life and family. We have a nice home, live in a pleasant neighbourhood, and go to a beautiful church. We make trips to the mall, go out to the movies, and take family vacations – often with little thoughts for the tragic lives of children thousands of miles
away. But then I get on a plane, and twenty-four hours later I find myself in the home of a grieving mother dying of AIDS and leaving her five children orphans. Or I see a baby slowly starving to death, a
child with one leg because of a landmine accident, or a little girl who was rescued from prostitution. And all of a sudden it becomes very personal again. Somebody else’s kids just became very important to me because now I know their names, I have looked into their eyes, and I have cried with their parents. I come back home angry at myself, incensed by my own apathy, with a fresh resolve and a renewed passion to crusade on behalf of these kids, to fight for them with every breath in my body. The meetings are no longer routine, and the balance sheets are no longer just numbers; they are now life-and-death issues. They’re urgent. We’ve got to do something! We’ve got to help! But
then, a few weeks later, the fire dies down again, the images in my head fade, I drift back inside my safe and protected world, and they’re somebody else’s kids again – not mine.

I mentioned earlier the prayer of World Vision’s founder, Bob Pierce, “Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God.” As I have these past ten years, tried to walk in some of his footsteps, I have gained new insight into his prayer. While it was a prayer he hoped everyone would pray, it was even more personal for him. You see, I believe that even Bob Pierce struggled to sustain the level of brokenheartedness and caring required to press ahead year after year in this work of loving the poor. His prayer was a crying out to God, that God would break his heart yet again and again, because if He didn’t, Bob knew he could not love someone else’s kids the way God did. No man or woman can unless God breaks that individual’s heart. Only then can he or she – or we – care as God cares and love as He loves. That’s why we must pray constantly that God will soften our hearts so we see the world the way He sees it.’