Care

 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.

Image: Parliament House, Melbourne