Friday, March 13, 2015

Empathy

The screams of Islam's victims reach me in the night.
I hear them in the day through the din of normal life,
I hear the cries of children, of boys used as girls,
of girls used as property, and mutilated in their own most sacred...
I hear the weeping of women, and the bleating of God's creatures,
I sense the contempt toward this world's beauty, the stench
of loathing reaches my nostrils, and having no power but in prayer –
I have to bear it.

One hears how stupid Christianity is, how archaic, how weak,
one hears how arrogant the Jews are, how fundamentalist are both;
one hears little of Buddhists, of Hindus, they must have become irrelevant;
of Muslims one hears a great wind and clamor of how discriminated they are,
how misjudged, how maligned, intolerated, how misinterpreted:
one is not allowed to address the sheer lack of empathy
for the victims of Islam, these are denied recognition
as the mainstream sleep-walkers fall over each other – even atheists,
to recognize and fawn upon the "Religion of Peace."


Confrontation is only to be viewed as hostile hatred and vile bigotry,
no one can imagine that confrontation comes from empathy.
But I will say this once, and I'll be saying it again until one more awakens:
Being Human is something truly, deeply divine at its core,
the one question of any consequence being, what defines it, being Human:
it is not defined by power or by wealth, not by poverty or by shame,
it is not decided by ideology at all, or religion, or sexual orientation;
neither politics nor supremacy, nor tyranny nor pitied victimhood,
nor doing-everything-right nor following someone nor being good.


What decides and defines the Human Being is the faculty of empathy.
Real empathy cannot be manipulated, nor faked, nor sentimentalized;
it has the taste of consciousness, it both reflects and is spurred to action,
where action is required after reflection.



I hear much about tolerance and about co-existence, useful cudgels
in the hands of today's molders of NewSpeak, who know nothing,
nothing whatsoever of real empathy.


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