(This was a soapbox to the Tualatin times many moons ago)

Compassion: “Deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with a wish to relieve it.” (American Heritage Dictionary).

We often confuse ‘compassion’ with sympathy or pity. Compassion is really sympathy-plus. If we are compassionate, we not only sense and care about someone else’s pain or misfortune, we take action to mitigate or remove it.

When former-President Bill Clinton said “I feel your pain,” he was not being compassionate, because he did little, if anything to lessen the pain.

The current president, George W. Bush, gained substantial mileage on the campaign trail with the oxymoronic expression “compassionate conservative.” The word ‘conservative’ connotes ‘respect for tradition or the traditional order.’ Since the traditional order, the status quo, consigns tens of millions of Americans to poverty, inadequate medical care, lousy nutrition, despair, and few means for self help, compassion could not fit. To relieve or eliminate suffering requires change, the very thing conservatism stands against.

But even conservatism is misapplied here. “W” and his followers do want change; they wish to unravel what’s left of the New Deal and its implicit social contract. They are reactionaries bent on disestablishing Social Security, the minimum wage, government regulation, the capital gains tax – if not all taxes. Meanwhile, there’s not a weapons program they would not fund, a place too sacred for oil exploration, or a police force that’s too small. Their “traditional order” would include: even more prisoners (managed by private corporations, of course), more prayer, more environmental destruction, more school testing, more dead convicts, more counter-terrorism, more enemies, and a single exception to a prohibition on human cloning – more John Ashcrofts.

On a personal level, we the privileged, the ones with a house in The Burbs on a cul-de-sac may think of ourselves as compassionate people but we don’t often show it.   We’re not compassionate, just sympathetic, and then only when it’s convenient. We worry about sprawl, traffic congestion, and the cell tower going in across the street. We address these issues after we’ve washed the SUV, swept out the garage, and spent our working hours reading and writing e-mails. We rarely ponder our existence or question the status quo.

If there is a God and He/She/It has a standard for compassion, then I suspect someday we’ll be asked to reconcile our personal, religious, and political beliefs and make some sense out of it all. To effectively align our beliefs with our actions, we need to work harder at seeing through the smoke screens, especially on the campaign trails. Probably worth thinking about the next time someone tries to convince you he or she is worthy of office because they proudly wear the label “compassionate conservative.”