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| THERE IS SOMETHING IN US that relishes bad news, even the most horrible news, about the suffering of other people. Isn't there a dark fascination with the impressive handiwork of soul-dead dictators like Serbia's Milosevic, who seem simply not to care what they do? Don't we experience a grim, yet at the same time hypnotising fixation with the sheer historic pageantry of the suffering of tens of thousands of Kosavar Albanians, fanning out in rivers of humanity from their homeland? Don't we just drink up every little detail about the amazingly cold-hearted high school killers in Littleton, Colorado, who literally tried to kill their high school?
I was at first appalled to hear a young news reporter quoted on the TV just as the two teenagers were bringing their homebrew Apocalypse down upon the heads of the peers they felt had slighted them. She said: "This is certainly one of the biggest stories I've ever covered in my career." It was a 'big story' to her, a career event. And that's seems just about right. How else do you take in something that seems so absurdly evil, something so beyond the pale of human behavior? One way you do it is you cordon it off, distance yourself from it---you turn it into a story. That way, you don't have to process it so deeply. That way, you push away the fear it might have happened to you, or your kids. Grim news is so absorbing because, in part, we're so glad it's not us or one of our loved ones lying in the pool of blood, or sleeping in the tent city or waiting for the aid truck to bring bread and water for that day's meal. From a distance, we can appreciate it all as an absorbing tale---and aren't scary, frightful stories sometimes the most entrancing, fascinating ones? Also, we can turn it off when we've had too much. Flick the channel. Avoid the news if it's too disturbing and our stomachs and hearts are simply not up for it. Compassion fatigue, it's called. Haven't we all been diagnosed with it now that global media technology is able to deliver to us each and every morning---right there beside out breakfast plate!---the absolute worst acts of depravity, violence and sadness committed by human beings around the globe the day before. Eat up! Once we've had our fill of other people's bad news, we sometimes have so little real compassion to offer in return. Is it even worse than that? Is it true for all of us what E.M. Forster says of the characters Fielding and Hamidullah in "A Passage to India," upon their learning of Mrs. Moore's death: "It is only one's own dead who matter. If for a moment the sense of communion in sorrow came to them, it passed. How indeed is it possible for one human being to be sorry for all the sadness that meets him on the face of the earth, for the pain that is endured not only by men, but by animals and plants, and perhaps by the stones? The soul is tired in a moment, and in fear of losing the little she does understand, she retreats to the permanent lines which habit or chance have dictated, and suffers there." What's a body to do, then, with all this bad news? Keep your compassion in shape, of course. Don't let it get flabby and lazy. Give to good causes that look after suffering rivers of humanity---visit the website of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) at www.dwb.org and send some money for Kosovo relief. Meditate, or learn how. And do it regularly, especially when the news is especially bad. The spirit needs the room when the mass media comes barging massively into your space and gets up in your face with the worst humanity has to offer. Also, take heed---even inspiration--from the suffering. There's work to be done, in the world and in ourselves. I asked Bhante Yogavacara Rahula, in the question-and-answer interview with the Therevadan Buddhist monk that leads off this third issue of Hundred Mountain online, how he keeps his spirits up, given the overwhelming amount of suffering and woe in the world. He keeps returning to Buddhist Dhamma, the Buddha's teachings, he says, which speak directly to how we create dukkha--suffering--in ourselves and in the world. And which lays out a path for transcending that suffering: "When I hear about all this suffering," says the monk, "it actually encourages my enthusiasm not to give up.There's no alternative when you look around and see how people are digging themselves deeper and deeper into the hole of dukkha." So may we all start digging--ourselves out. EDITOR: Douglas Imbrogno PREVIOUSLY:
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