Compassion

It has been brought to my attention that some people who have read these posts do not think I have any compassion, that Conservatism has little to no sympathy for others. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Conservatism requires a personal sense of compassion, a deep sympathy for those who surround you- a sense of community and a feeling of shared pain. That it requires no governmental enforcement is a positive, not, as most on the far left today assume, a negative.

How can this be? Simple: Conservatism cares about people AS INDIVIDUALS, real people with real stories and individual problems and needs. A massive and top heavy government can never hope to provide the care for those people on an individual basis. So they are reduced to generalizations and social security numbers to keep them straight. Helpful, no?

Not really, as the data on poverty shows. The poverty rate of Americans in 1900 stood at 18.3%, with the federal budget standing at 6.4% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). That is 18.3% without Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Welfare, Food Stamps, nothing. Opportunity was yours, your money could be spent on whatever you thought would make your life and the lives of those you loved better.

Fast forward a century. The poverty rate has dropped a whole 4.9 percentage points, while the programs created to supposedly end poverty altogether cost our people about 1.5 trillion dollars last year alone. That means that the State could have written a check to every one of those people below the poverty line for $37,688. But it didn't.

Instead all that money was taken from people with families, businesses with employees. The money that could have been used to increase the size of the production floor to hire more workers? Gone. The money a person could have used to help pay their child's tuition? Gone. Taken by a government who neither personally understands nor cares about you as an individual, but rather sees you as a number in the system or part of a line on a chart. Where is the compassion in that?

Compassion requires, by definition, that you feel the distress and pity for the suffering or misfortune of another. That requires one on one interaction, a true knowledge of the person you seek to give aid to. This is something a group of people a thousand miles away, who fly on military jets and bill it to the same people they are supposed to care for, simply cannot have the capacity to do.

But the mother watching her child hooked up to a respirator can. And so can all the child's aunts and uncles, their friends and neighbors. They feel it in a real, whole way; the pain of it, the fear, the need to help is automatic and noble. I know. I have been there.

But where is the nobility in giving if it is forced by another? Are you giving of yourself, or are you more interested in giving from some other person's pocket? And do you understand that by taking what that person has you have stolen their ability to do as much as they could have done? That is what the government now does- takes from someone's pocket, someone you do not know, who cannot possibly have any real sympathy for your plight, and giving it to you or someone else. There is no compassion there; and in doing so is there supposed to be some satisfaction, some sense of having done the right thing?

America has been the most generous giver, per capita, for quite a long time. It has been historically one of our greatest strengths, that willingness to give freely of what we have for the good of those around us. Especially among those at the high income levels. But now the amount of personal donations by middle class people and below are on a rapid decline. Even before the current economic fear took hold we had stopped much of that charitable giving. But why?

The only answer I can see is that the outrageous, inefficient and faceless giving by our own government has so damaged our culture that we feel it is no longer the responsibility of the individual to give to those in need. We count it as laziness that a person would not seek a government handout rather than a strength. The brave people who created this nation would be ashamed at our lack of personal care, our dearth of real sympathy towards our fellow man, and the very idea that we as a people have ceded our moral character to the will of an elite collective and those who would seek to save us from ourselves by taking what we have.

I know the thought, the idea, of giving from a nation is one that stirs pride in many people. But in the emptiness of compassion, the impersonal indifference to our growing indigence towards those around us and closest to us, we must ask: what cost does that pride come at- where has the compassion gone?