My Reflection On: "On Compassion" by Barbara Lazear Ascher

                No matter where we go it seems that there is always poverty, and the homeless just about anywhere. Their presence is like those of roaches, there aren’t many of them crowded in a single place, but somehow they are always, solidly, eerily present. All one has to do is walk through a bustling street and he or she would find a few here and there. I bet you you’d find a few homeless people even in the deepest depths of bloody hell. Poverty and the homeless is a significant part of what I’m about to talk about, but it’s not the main topic. I started this piece because apparently, people feel compassion when it comes to homeless people.

                Barbara Lazear Ascher believes that compassion is not something that is born with us when we escape our mother’s womb; it is something that is learned through experience. I do agree that compassion is not an innate trait we humans possess, but I do not entirely agree that experience with the homeless and the poor is what will bring about compassion. Fortunately for me, I have not been exposed to the horrors of poverty when I was little, Singapore was a small place, and there was little room for the poor. Much of what I could get from experience with the poor when I was little was when I was in kindergarten and I learned it was ‘common courtesy’ to empty your pockets for them. Which I found to mean, ‘give what you can afford to this complete stranger because that’s what a descent person would do’, you’ll forgive me for saying so, but I didn’t understand a lick of why I’d do such a thing. Obviously, people who haven’t seen the homeless do not feel compassion; Barbara Lazear Ascher was right about that much at least.

                For what it’s worth, much of my real life experiences with the poor were after I came to Malaysia. What with the mandatory Malaysia Week, and the GAP program and what-not, what can I say, it was forced upon me. For the first time, I came to know what it meant to be poor and homeless. I came to realize that what a descent person would do, is empty his or her pockets. But yet, I did not learn compassion. The more I came to learn what it meant to be compassionate, the more I realized that it simply meant I’d feel the same pain the poor feel when I observe them. I reckoned it simply wasn’t worth the struggle. I learned that compassion led to service, which aimed to rid of poverty and alleviate the pain. I also came to notice that much of the service we did made little or no dent on the horrors of poverty. Compassion simply wasn’t worth the effort.

                Even today when I find a homeless person, the instinct of a descent person is the first to emerge. As a descent person, or at least I like to think of myself as one, I reach into my pocket, but then my experiences are taken into account, and the compassion switch is turned off. I then do what any mature, intelligent, pragmatic, and logical person would do. I pretend to rummage for change. Obviously I haven’t learned compassion yet, and probably won’t any time soon.