So says Pandora at this Delaware Liberal thread. Steve Newton at Delaware Libertarian sort of beat me to the punch in discussing this point, although his post was actually about opposition to the death penalty. I've been thinking about it for the past couple of days, since the discussion first came up, and it's pretty difficult to wrap one's mind around this idea when there are examples all over.
In the thread at DL, I brought up a couple of examples where unconditional compassion (sounds redundant to me) have occurred in recent and not so recent times.
First, there was the case of the Amish schoolhouse shooting of 2006.
In just about any other community, a deadly school shooting would have brought demands from civic leaders for tighter gun laws and better security, and the victims' loved ones would have lashed out at the gunman's family or threatened to sue.
But that's not the Amish way.
As they struggle with the slayings of five of their children in a one-room schoolhouse, the Amish in this Lancaster County village are turning the other cheek, urging forgiveness of the killer and quietly accepting what comes their way as God's will...
The Amish have also been reaching out to the family of the gunman, Charles Carl Roberts IV, 32, who committed suicide during the attack.
The second case concerned the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II.
The point I tried to make on the DL thread is that compassion, by its very nature, is unconditional. I don't believe that most of us display compassion in every instance of our lives, but that doesn't mean it does not exist, even if it is only in fits and starts. The whole idea behind "random acts of kindness" is that a little compassion can go a long way.
I think that the blogosphere is particularly harsh and cynical, which is why compassion may seem unattainable. And, in a political sense, conservatives are generally happier than liberals, which may motivate them to give more freely, thus, displaying compassion on a microlevel. Perhaps those are the reasons I disagree that "unconditional compassion doesn't exist."
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