Have you got compassion fatigue?
What’s the worst quality you can think of in a person? I’m sorry to start your Saturday on such a negative note – as in, “Happy weekend! Hope you’ve enjoyed a lie-in and a nice cup of tea, now could you tap into your misanthropic side and compile a list of all the things about your fellow humans that make you seethe uncontrollably?”– but I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what it is I despise most about mankind, and I wondered if you fancied joining in? A jolly game of bitterness before breakfast, if you will. (If you’re reading this online, you might want to skip the rest of this column and scroll to the bottom where I can guarantee plenty of subscribers will suggest that the very worst thing about humanity is me and my inane wittering.)
Anyway, I think I’ve decided what it is that irks me most in life. It’s people being mean. Unkind. Miserly. Not financially – it’s having no generosity of spirit. I’m not talking about the comments beneath this column; I have no problem with people not liking my writing given that I am big and ugly enough to look after myself. No. I’m talking about unkindness to the people who have lost everything or are about to lose everything.
In a never-ending news cycle, we seem to have become incredibly mean-spirited to victims, sufferers and survivors, to people who have endured terrible hardship and misery. There is limited patience for those in need, to the point that there is often a sense of feeling hard done by the hard done by. Take the tweets written last week by a councillor in Ipswich about Grenfell Tower.
Nadia Cenci was forced to delete her Twitter account after a series of posts in which she suggested that survivors should be grateful to be alive. “Support for Grenfell residents is fading,” wrote Malcolm Wood. “They have been offered money, food, clothing, housing and full support, yet still they complain.” To which Cenci replied: “Not forgetting that they actually came out of it alive.”
Someone else said that they thought some residents were illegally sub-letting, “which is why they can’t compile a full list”. Cenci agreed. “Yep… I’ve just stopped listening and my sympathy is diminishing – I can’t pretend otherwise.”
I am genuinely baffled by the notion that sympathy is something that should come with caveats, that someone whose home burnt down because their tower block was wrapped in the architectural equivalent of petroleum should be less deserving of my compassion because their landlords were dodgy. Should the milk of human kindness run dry because of someone’s immigration status? Should the community around Grenfell, criticised for still kicking up a stink in council meetings, simply keep calm and carry on because the rest of us have grown tired of their particular tragedy?
I was shocked to hear a group talking the other day about how “bored” they were with the Charlie Gard story, as if it were a reality TV series that had run its course. Is this what 24-hour news has done, turned us into unfeeling monsters who see sympathy as something with a sell-by date? Compassion as commodity. You are no longer deserving of my feelings. Next!
I found myself near Grenfell this week, staring up at the blackened tombstone in the sky. It is a shocking thing to see, a ghastly, grotesque stain on our society that made me feel thoroughly ashamed to be British. I felt relieved that I did not have to see this every day, that I could swipe left on the story or turn the page of my paper if it felt too much. Others do not have that luxury. Every moment of their lives, they must breathe in this tragedy.
Four weeks it has been. Four short weeks. We need to give these people time. Our time. However much they may need. To the people of Grenfell, to those whose lives were shattered by the London Bridge and Manchester terror attacks, to the parents of Charlie Gard: you have my sympathy. My endless, unlimited sympathy. It is the smallest thing that I can give you. A tiny piece of love, sent from a world that is still spinning, to you in your world that has stopped.