Werner Reich, holocaust survivor. He stands before a room with an average age of grey, and tells his tale. He more often speaks at Middle and High Schools than at public libraries. His words, once literal, now symbolic: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Zyklon B.
He was beaten and herded worse than cattle, starved, frozen, enslaved. Others just like him were killed by the millions. He attributes his survival to pure luck, and rightly so, for no reason can account for the actions of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.
The war, he says, was divided into four groups. The victims, who were powerless to transform their condition, and the bullies and their gang, whose pack mentality enabled the cycle of violence. The Just, who saw injustice and acted to right it, and finally, perhaps the worst of all, the good people who did nothing. He quotes George Bernard Shaw (whom I haven’t read if you were wondering):
“Indifference is the essence of inhumanity.”
And the people nod their heads in affirmation. And the people raise their hands to their mouths, and exhale at the account of suffering.
He acknowledges many times the suffering of not only the Jews, but also the gypsies and muslims and blacks and even – without a hiccup in his voice – the homosexuals. Bravo I say. Yet how many hear this news and silently covet their own reservations about allowing those damn gays their freedom?
DO NOT BE A GOOD PERSON WHO DOES NOTHING!
What will they actually do I wonder? Do they send their checks to the Red Cross and say “That is enough”? Perhaps some actively minister to the poor. Perhaps they go out of their way to name the modern genocides and speak about action amongst their friends? Do they?
Suffering exists aplenty still. Perhaps not on our doorsteps, no, but near enough. Are you aiming to better the education of the poor in your community? Am I? And when a trip on a Boeing 747 can get you halfway across the world in half a day, what excuses have we to not engage suffering in full when it rears its ugliest head?
I swear to you, sometimes I feel as though it is illegal to do good in this world!
I have no skills save for a middle-class American education, two eyes, ears, hands and feet. I have compassion. What can I do? Who will take me? I feel like begging at the door of the impoverished and weeping “Please forgive me! I have been such a fool. Please let me help you! Let me dedicate the good of my life to you!”
Would I do this at any old bum’s door? No. Somehow I would have to feel that they deserved my self-pity. That my slice of western civilization was responsible for the chain of events that lead to their woe.
Perhaps my own solipsism causes my distress. They are happy. They are in command of their own futures. Who am I to interfere? To see them as impoverished in any way? Just because they haven’t my income does not make them impoverished of spirit, of family, or of a connection to nature. I have that lack, not they.
If a mother carrying a child lay on a muddy cloth on your doorstep, each frail and mortal, you would feel immediately compelled to act. You would call an ambulance, attend to their needs if possible, and see that they were given a chance to stand. These people number in the millions, and they exist no more than 18 hours from where you sit. They are not conveniently concentrated in a camp, such that we may focus easily on their suffering. They are everywhere. Will you help them? Will I?
“This is not about pity. It’s more about passion. Pity sees suffering and wants to ease the pain; passion sees injustice and wants to settle the score. Pity implores the powerful to pay attention; passion warns them about what will happen if they don’t. The risk of pity is that it kills with kindness; the promise of passion is that it builds on the hope that the poor are fully capable of helping themselves if given the chance. In 2005 the world’s poor needed no more condolences; they needed people to get interested, get mad and then get to work.”
Nancy Gibbs – Time Magazine article “The Good Samaritans”
