The Death of the Compassionate Response

Compassion: sympathetic consciousness of others' distress together with a desire to alleviate it. (source: Merriam-Webster Online)

When did it become acceptable to kick someone when they're down? It's not like it hasn't happened before, it has. For years there have been some people who've taken the opportunity of someone's loss to take them to task for how that loss happened - or didn't happen soon enough, in some cases - or how they responded to it, or how they feel about it. But those displays of a total absence of empathy came from people we knew were empathetically-impaired, from people who are unable to see things from any perspective other than their own, and they didn't happen all that often. Today, it happens frequently, and it makes me angry.

What's the purpose in telling someone with a dead kitten what they should have done? Especially someone who's not stupid, who learns from everything she reads and experiences and who retains that knowledge, who is perfectly capable of administering competent first aid, who is perfectly capable of making sound decisions for the animals in her care, and who has done some pretty amazing things with the very limited resources available to her. Someone who's saved a lot more lives than she's lost. How does telling her what one thinks she should have done, castigating her for not doing it, express empathy or even sympathy in any way? How could anyone consider such a response to be compassionate?

Whatever happened to a simple "I'm so sorry for your loss"? Why is that so difficult, if not impossible, for some people to say? Where is their compassion for another human being's pain? (Though I seriously wonder, sometimes, if some of those people ever had any compassion in the first place.) When did it become more important to beat someone up for the circumstances of a loss than to express sympathy for the loss itself, and the accompanying grief?

(And let's not even get started on someone who'll jump into something because they see it as a platform to advance their own agenda. They're the lowest of the low, in my opinion.)

Strong, knowledgeable, compassionate voices have been stilled by such behavior. They've left the community rather than suffer repeated ill treatment. The loss of that knowledge and compassion has been huge, the void unfillable, not only for the remaining community members themselves but for the animals in their lives. It's a damn shame.