A tsunami travels on average at about 750km per hour; a sneeze can go as fast as 80% the speed of sound or around 1000 km per hour; sympathy travels at an incalculable speed, at times faster than light, at times lingering slowly like a bad smell. Unlike a tsunami or a sneeze, sympathy can change states, from an unmovable solid to jetting out of the room like so many errant photons. I first noticed this phenomenon while watching a fund raising event on Taiwanese television-thanks to our satellite dish-with my Grandmother over our nondenominational winter break.
“She is a famous singer in Taiwan, do you think she’s pretty?” my Grandma asked rhetorically in mandarin.
“What are you watching?” I dutifully reply.
“Taiwan is raising money for the Tsunami victims. You look, Taiwan is so much smaller than China and it has already raised much more money.” She paused, and nodded sagely, “It is terrible isn’t it. Today they reported a man from Germany is looking for his wife and daughter.” There it was, the proverbial elephant in the room, hanging thick and sweaty: sympathy. I felt thick phlegm and heartburn, physically manifested sympathy, holding me in time like fruit suspended in a jelly mold. It was a silent, eternal, finger twitching moment. “See that handsome man on stage? that is Jackie Chan’s son.”
“Yeah” I say in English.
“He sings too.”
“His face, it is skinnier than Jackie Chan’s” My grandmother nodded in agreement, and sympathy walked out of the door without so much as lifting its hat to give us a toodle-oo. Sympathy ruined the moment of generational outreach, instead of hard candy, the universal bridge between the generation gaps; I got a sense of helplessness that left a bitter taste in my mouth.
For me sympathy is a seldom guest, and I know little how to entertain it. We all have different ways of handling sympathy; some of us even ignore it all together. However, as far as impetus goes, you don’t need Maury Povich to tell you the father of sympathy is suffering, we all know what suffering entails-being uncomfortable, powerless, and cosmically small. As an American (can I have a dab of Taiwanese on the side?) I feel that we need to eradicate all bad feelings, including gut wrenching sympathy, and as an American I think we should approach this in a thorough, gun-ho fashion and make a frontal assault on the source: human suffering, or tragedy.
Suffering and tragedy is a tricky foe, not only is it ubiquitous, it is vague and like sympathy its attacks stretch from ephemeral to infinity. Also, not all suffering evokes sympathy, only suffering that evokes sympathy is important to us out of sheer logistics. There is only so much suffering we can prevent, logically we should concentrate on the suffering that makes us feel bad.
In our privileged age are two causalities to suffering in mankind, Mother Nature and other men; however one cause of death is more natural than the other; one evokes sympathy, the other does not. For example, a man loses his job, becomes homeless and as a result must live by scavenging out of dumpsters. He turns to alcohol to cope with his lowly existence and eventually dies cold, drunk and alone in some gutter. He was a bum on the sidewalk, mere topographical alterations standard in any concrete jungle. He died because he wasn’t able to assimilate into our society. There is no need to pity him because his death was due to his inability to carpe diem, he died as a choice and the exercise of that choice is the paradigm of Americanism. However, if that same man were to lose his job, and while he was piddling around looking for a job, he gets crushed by a tree that was struck by lightning it is tragedy in its quintessence. There was no “freedom” in that death, therefore it lacked Americanism. No one deserves to die without a choice. Suffering over duration and dying as a result of that suffering isn’t equal to an aberrant death because the duration of the suffering is always filled with opportunity. To believe that my previous statement is false would be saying that our land is not the land of opportunity, or in other words, treason.
A tsunami kills tens of thousands and our stock market yawns unknowingly, “Who is Indonesia?” The compassionate populace of USA rummages through their wallets and purses looking for a Band-Aid to suture the wound nature inflicted on mankind. Ever since we have gotten to know her, Mother Nature’s bellicose has wreaked havoc on mankind. It is time for America to do something with its categorically lonely position as sole super power; it is time for us to unite mankind against our greatest threat. Helping our fellow man, especially when they are downtrodden by some inexplicable force is commonsense, speciesism, and we love it because our nature necessitates it. After all, America is a nation of justice, people should only get what they deserve and no one deserves to die without warning or explanation.
How do we really know tragedy by aberration is more wrong, more unnatural, than socially inflicted tragedies? I say we look to our celebrities, the elite of society who should be our political role models because their occupation and elite status allows them to see things in the world that are opaque to the laymen. Christopher Reeves wasn’t a philanthropist or a spokesperson for stem cell research before he became a paraplegic; nor would Michel J. Fox be a figure head for Parkinson’s if he were not a victim himself; and Paris Hilton won’t be a driving force in a cure for AIDS until she contracts it from a trick she meets during the filming of “Simple Life 6: Internet Chat Rooms.” They are the thick icing of our cakey American populace, the harbingers of humanity’s moral future. Not only do they belong to the best country in the world, they are the best people in the best country. One may argue that there are plenty of philanthropic celebrities that do not have direct suffering as the reason behind their giving. My argument is that what they’re doing isn’t really charity because proportionately they’re giving is actually reciprocal to how much they have suffered from the cause they’re trying to assuage with money, so the money they give in a relative scale is sadly moot.
It is true, majority of the victims of the tsunami were impoverished and needed money before the tsunami, but why does that matter? After all, poverty is simply a result of complacency, sloth, and stupidity. Why should Americans blink when the poor don’t lift themselves up and get a job? Poverty isn’t tragic, it’s deserved; death by tsunami on the other hand is front page drama. Many argue that America might be making the same mistakes Great Britain did when they invested too much in Asian and in particular Indonesia during colonialism. This would be true if we were investing solely out of economic reasons, this is wrong; we have a duty to mankind to fight its enemies.
It is our patriotic duty to care now; Indonesians didn’t deserve to be killed by the tsunami, they deserved to live out the rest of their life in unbearable squalor and eventually die poor and malnourished. Nature took away what was natural, and we need to take the steps to fight it. George W. Bush, in the interest of the American public has declared a war against terror, and what greater terrorist is there than Mother Nature, with her cowardly attacks on mankind-biological warfare leading us to have a shortage in flue vaccines (in 1999, 20,000 American deaths can be attributed to the flu, while a mere 15,517 were due to murders), earthquakes that can be measured in nuclear megatons, hurricanes that smash through countries like a German blitzkrieg. Mother Nature should know by now that Americans don’t negotiate with terrorists.
Mankind need not live in fear of nature; we can do something. Like anything else, the easiest solutions for Americans would be to use greenbacks, dough, cold hard cash, as the universal bandage, a panacea for suffering. After all, if money can talk, sympathy should listen and leave. Americans that feel moral outrage at how our society treats things know that cultivating such an emotion requires much time, and much research-one does not feel sympathy if one is ignorant of suffering. But we can treat it, we are the greatest country in the world, and my suggestion is a program needs to be created for the tired, socially conscious sympathetic American. The government could possibly create a bracelet program where a portion of income would be deducted to from the wearer and donated to any aberrant deaths. The bracelets would make identify the morally conscious, and the wearer would have his quota of caring filled. Lastly, the cost of the bracelets would have to be proportionately damaging to the finance of the wearer to the amount of sympathy the government program feels is the correct amount to dispense for that month, thereby standardizing charity.
I only wish I had thought of this before winter break. I would have enjoyed the sweet serenades of Jackie Chan’s son with my Grandmother and had a true Werther’s Original moment.
William Chuang
William Chuang
Preserving Sweet Humanity
A tsunami travels on average at about 750km per hour; a sneeze can go as fast as 80% the speed of sound or around 1000 km per hour; sympathy travels at an incalculable speed, at times faster than light, at times lingering slowly like a bad smell. Unlike a tsunami or a sneeze, sympathy can change states, from an unmovable solid to jetting out of the room like so many errant photons. I first noticed this phenomenon while watching a fund raising event on Taiwanese television-thanks to our satellite dish-with my Grandmother over our nondenominational winter break.
“She is a famous singer in Taiwan, do you think she’s pretty?” my Grandma asked rhetorically in mandarin.
“What are you watching?” I dutifully reply.
“Taiwan is raising money for the Tsunami victims. You look, Taiwan is so much smaller than China and it has already raised much more money.” She paused, and nodded sagely, “It is terrible isn’t it. Today they reported a man from Germany is looking for his wife and daughter.” There it was, the proverbial elephant in the room, hanging thick and sweaty: sympathy. I felt thick phlegm and heartburn, physically manifested sympathy, holding me in time like fruit suspended in a jelly mold. It was a silent, eternal, finger twitching moment. “See that handsome man on stage? that is Jackie Chan’s son.”
“Yeah” I say in English.
“He sings too.”
“His face, it is skinnier than Jackie Chan’s” My grandmother nodded in agreement, and sympathy walked out of the door without so much as lifting its hat to give us a toodle-oo. Sympathy ruined the moment of generational outreach, instead of hard candy, the universal bridge between the generation gaps; I got a sense of helplessness that left a bitter taste in my mouth.
For me sympathy is a seldom guest, and I know little how to entertain it. We all have different ways of handling sympathy; some of us even ignore it all together. However, as far as impetus goes, you don’t need Maury Povich to tell you the father of sympathy is suffering, we all know what suffering entails-being uncomfortable, powerless, and cosmically small. As an American (can I have a dab of Taiwanese on the side?) I feel that we need to eradicate all bad feelings, including gut wrenching sympathy, and as an American I think we should approach this in a thorough, gun-ho fashion and make a frontal assault on the source: human suffering, or tragedy.
Suffering and tragedy is a tricky foe, not only is it ubiquitous, it is vague and like sympathy its attacks stretch from ephemeral to infinity. Also, not all suffering evokes sympathy, only suffering that evokes sympathy is important to us out of sheer logistics. There is only so much suffering we can prevent, logically we should concentrate on the suffering that makes us feel bad.
In our privileged age are two causalities to suffering in mankind, Mother Nature and other men; however one cause of death is more natural than the other; one evokes sympathy, the other does not. For example, a man loses his job, becomes homeless and as a result must live by scavenging out of dumpsters. He turns to alcohol to cope with his lowly existence and eventually dies cold, drunk and alone in some gutter. He was a bum on the sidewalk, mere topographical alterations standard in any concrete jungle. He died because he wasn’t able to assimilate into our society. There is no need to pity him because his death was due to his inability to carpe diem, he died as a choice and the exercise of that choice is the paradigm of Americanism. However, if that same man were to lose his job, and while he was piddling around looking for a job, he gets crushed by a tree that was struck by lightning it is tragedy in its quintessence. There was no “freedom” in that death, therefore it lacked Americanism. No one deserves to die without a choice. Suffering over duration and dying as a result of that suffering isn’t equal to an aberrant death because the duration of the suffering is always filled with opportunity. To believe that my previous statement is false would be saying that our land is not the land of opportunity, or in other words, treason.
A tsunami kills tens of thousands and our stock market yawns unknowingly, “Who is Indonesia?” The compassionate populace of USA rummages through their wallets and purses looking for a Band-Aid to suture the wound nature inflicted on mankind. Ever since we have gotten to know her, Mother Nature’s bellicose has wreaked havoc on mankind. It is time for America to do something with its categorically lonely position as sole super power; it is time for us to unite mankind against our greatest threat. Helping our fellow man, especially when they are downtrodden by some inexplicable force is commonsense, speciesism, and we love it because our nature necessitates it. After all, America is a nation of justice, people should only get what they deserve and no one deserves to die without warning or explanation.
How do we really know tragedy by aberration is more wrong, more unnatural, than socially inflicted tragedies? I say we look to our celebrities, the elite of society who should be our political role models because their occupation and elite status allows them to see things in the world that are opaque to the laymen. Christopher Reeves wasn’t a philanthropist or a spokesperson for stem cell research before he became a paraplegic; nor would Michel J. Fox be a figure head for Parkinson’s if he were not a victim himself; and Paris Hilton won’t be a driving force in a cure for AIDS until she contracts it from a trick she meets during the filming of “Simple Life 6: Internet Chat Rooms.” They are the thick icing of our cakey American populace, the harbingers of humanity’s moral future. Not only do they belong to the best country in the world, they are the best people in the best country. One may argue that there are plenty of philanthropic celebrities that do not have direct suffering as the reason behind their giving. My argument is that what they’re doing isn’t really charity because proportionately they’re giving is actually reciprocal to how much they have suffered from the cause they’re trying to assuage with money, so the money they give in a relative scale is sadly moot.
It is true, majority of the victims of the tsunami were impoverished and needed money before the tsunami, but why does that matter? After all, poverty is simply a result of complacency, sloth, and stupidity. Why should Americans blink when the poor don’t lift themselves up and get a job? Poverty isn’t tragic, it’s deserved; death by tsunami on the other hand is front page drama. Many argue that America might be making the same mistakes Great Britain did when they invested too much in Asian and in particular Indonesia during colonialism. This would be true if we were investing solely out of economic reasons, this is wrong; we have a duty to mankind to fight its enemies.
It is our patriotic duty to care now; Indonesians didn’t deserve to be killed by the tsunami, they deserved to live out the rest of their life in unbearable squalor and eventually die poor and malnourished. Nature took away what was natural, and we need to take the steps to fight it. George W. Bush, in the interest of the American public has declared a war against terror, and what greater terrorist is there than Mother Nature, with her cowardly attacks on mankind-biological warfare leading us to have a shortage in flue vaccines (in 1999, 20,000 American deaths can be attributed to the flu, while a mere 15,517 were due to murders), earthquakes that can be measured in nuclear megatons, hurricanes that smash through countries like a German blitzkrieg. Mother Nature should know by now that Americans don’t negotiate with terrorists.
Mankind need not live in fear of nature; we can do something. Like anything else, the easiest solutions for Americans would be to use greenbacks, dough, cold hard cash, as the universal bandage, a panacea for suffering. After all, if money can talk, sympathy should listen and leave. Americans that feel moral outrage at how our society treats things know that cultivating such an emotion requires much time, and much research-one does not feel sympathy if one is ignorant of suffering. But we can treat it, we are the greatest country in the world, and my suggestion is a program needs to be created for the tired, socially conscious sympathetic American. The government could possibly create a bracelet program where a portion of income would be deducted to from the wearer and donated to any aberrant deaths. The bracelets would make identify the morally conscious, and the wearer would have his quota of caring filled. Lastly, the cost of the bracelets would have to be proportionately damaging to the finance of the wearer to the amount of sympathy the government program feels is the correct amount to dispense for that month, thereby standardizing charity.
I only wish I had thought of this before winter break. I would have enjoyed the sweet serenades of Jackie Chan’s son with my Grandmother and had a true Werther’s Original moment.