A Need For Compassion - Editorial
Lately, it seems like compassion is getting harder and harder to come by.
There is a lot going on in the world, and the news cycle has, for years now, been overwhelmingly fraught with violence, vitriol and tragedy. No matter where you look, varying degrees of hatred, discrimination or prejudice abound.
Our front page this week features two stories in which this very issue is in the spotlight, and they’re both from right here on the Upper Cape.
One article addresses an alarmingly increasing rate of antisemitic incidents happening across Cape Cod. In the last two years, the Anti-Defamation League has recorded 26 incidents of antisemitism, white supremacy and hate speech across Barnstable County—and those are only the incidents reported to the organization.
The other article both involves and invokes broad discussions of race, the housing and border crises and, more specifically, what to do about the increasing population of migrants seeking emergency shelter.
Each of these articles made us wonder: have we, as humans, lost touch with the ability to treat our fellow humans with compassion? Is it possible that the dire circumstances of both this country and the world have eroded our sense of empathy and understanding for our fellow humans? We hope the answer is no, that these human characteristics of tolerance and understanding have not vanished.
We are all just humans, each and every one of us. The unspoken but omnipresent social mentality of “us versus them” hurts more people than it serves, and is generally discordant with those characteristics that make us uniquely human. Society would do well to leave that mindset behind.