Let's pretend for a minute that it wasn't a lion in Zimbabwe but your beloved pet dog in your own backyard. And supposing someone raised a rifle and shot your dear pet? Would your reaction be the same? A post on a social media, a little head wagging and an obligatory "Oh my goodness!" The evil in the world just became personal, didn't it? Your reactions would reflect your anger and horror. In comparative retrospect, how much did you really care about the lion incident? You see the point more clearly now, don't you?
Now, let's step away from dead lions and pet dogs and move our thinking toward the suffering of actual human beings, not in some distant remote land but walking distance from your own dinner table. Can we still look in the mirror as we brush those pearly whites and feel the same sense of goodness? Are we still ok with our sense of goodness that we believed about ourselves earlier when we consider soup kitchens in your home town, with not enough soup? Closets full of old clothes that we will never wear again, warehoused while homeless people go cold in the street? Children living in vulnerability and fear with no one to reach out to help them? Now it is personal, like the analogous pet dog that was shot just a paragraph earlier. Can you just wag your head and consider it a damn shame, to maintain your goodness? You could do something, but will you?
Is our goodness some sort of intrinsic bubble wrap that insulates us from actually acting with compassion and trying to make a difference in the world? Maybe it is time to pop the bubble wrap, it is time to touch human lives and rid ourselves of the pseudo-concerns for the real thing. Why? Because we are real human beings, and the human race is simply one tribe of which we are all members. In reality, the entire human race is our own backyard. Pick a piece of it, in your own neighborhood, state or province. Or hop onto our project, Changes for New Hope in the Peruvian Andes where I came to build a project to help children living in destitution. (www.changesfornewhope.org) Regardless of where you choose to do it, recognize that you do have the time, a few dollars, and basic human compassion, to do it. One of those lives that you enhance is going to be the one looking back at you in that mirror, trust me.
~~ Jim Killon