While reading the essay, "On Compassion" by Barbara Lazear Ascher, I came across a passage regarding the Mayor of New York City's decision to place all of the homeless in a nearby hospital. The passage reads:
I think the mayor’s notation is humane, but I fear it is something else as well. Raw humanity offends our sensibilities. We want to protect ourselves from an awareness of rags with voices that make no sense and scream forth in inarticulate rage. We do not wish to be reminded of the tentative state of our own well-being and sanity. And so, the troublesome presence is removed from the awareness of the electorate.
Ascher seems to feel that the lack of permanence as an inherent aspect of human existence, in her words, "the tentative state of our own well-being and sanity," is something that we as humans can be ignorant of and have a difficult time facing. I'd tend to agree, on a political, societal and existential level, these are topics difficult to grapple with, and ones that cannot be looked up in some encyclopedia or plugged into a math equation, if we even decide to face them at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment