August 21 Word of the Day: Care
Times arrive, moments and days, when care is put
at a distance, due to too much demand on care. Caring occurs at the level of
individual capacity for caring. To pay attention to the daily news is to
experience high demand on the ability of caring, equally or at all, on each
news item. One laughs at an opinion piece addressing the small matter of sin,
its author theorising sin into handy compartments, his article surrounded by
pages of news items for which the prime cause of their existence is sin. Has
our author ever asked about the root cause of most news items, unstated but their
reason for being, that cause being some kind of sin? We turn the page. Sin is
so unpopular as a subject unlike, it seems, its outcomes to an average reader.
Such overload of news about people in the world leads to the disagreeable
condition, recently coined, called empathy fatigue. That empathy can be
quantified at all, with corresponding levels of plethora, balance, fatigue, and
one thinks downward logically zero, would mean caring is okay for some but not
for me and certainly not today with the case in hand. Fatigue in this use actually
seems to mean the exhausting experience of being expected to care about everything
and sundry, regardless of immediate need or even one’s own well-being. People
in well-paid positions are available to help deal with your empathy fatigue, their
job being caring at a price. Relentlessly many people refuse to visit such
well-paid people, choosing instead to join the rank-and-file of the recently
coined doomscrollers, and the like. This numbing addiction to uncaring hours
spent indulging in discovering the results of sin is widespread, with the cure
being weaning, or simply learning how to stop. But how? Love your neighbour as
yourself, people that probably include amoral journalists and eye-rolling
doomscrollers, is a lead, though how we treat each individual case of neighbour
depends on who we are and how we wish to be cared for. The commandment is quite
explicit, five words, while the words needed in each case may expand into books
and lifetimes. And then there is the need to be paying attention in the first
place. To care for another requires one to notice that the person is there,
with needs, a task that itself is an act of care. Added to which one must have
the preparedness to see the needs and act upon them. In most cases this does
not involve payment of any kind, and may result in reactions and rejections
that will discourage and even fatigue. Sin is so tiresome, it’s stupid. Yet
times arrive when the demand for care cannot be put off another moment. We must
do what we must with the little at our disposal. Zero won’t do. We must at
least try for average.
