An unjustified reason not to feel.

In a lecture last night I learned about perpetrators of grave crimes: of the people that took part in the holocaust, of those in the Rwandan genocide, and other massive human rights violations. As much as we as outsiders looking in on the history want to paint the perpetrators as something other than us, extensive studies show that perpetrators are ordinary people. They are ordinary people that owing to a number of factors in a high-stress situation come to do extraordinarily evil things. But the common misconception that must be dispelled is that they are not extraordinary people.

I sat in class listening and believing both what I had read and what I was hearing about these ordinary men, but I thought in my mind that gosh, if “I” was ever confronted with a situation like that, committing atrocities would certainly horrify me and surely prevent me from inflicting pain onto others. While I do sincerely believe that my moral compass would not be lost, a colleague of mine reminded me last night of the somewhat frail nature of the human mind. She mentioned that she used to give beggars money when she would see them on the street. But after awhile there were so many and after awhile she just stopped, and stopped acknowledging them. Well, her simple admission struck a particularly powerful chord with me. I remember living in Shenzhen a few years ago and every time I would walk down the main street in the city, Shennan Lu, I would see so many beggars and seemingly homeless people. They tore at my heart because many were missing limbs or holding frail children in their arms and clothed in winter in tattered tshirts. I wanted to help. I would put change from my pocket into their bowl or their hat and try to look them in the eye. I felt that even if I could not lift them out of their desperate situation, at least I was trying to do something. This continued for a few months. Then a friend of mine living in the city told me a story. She asked if I had seen “all those deformed” beggars on Shennan Lu. I said yes I had seen people in need of help on the street. She told me that they were all being exploited by a particular gang or group in the city whereby the gang would go to the countryside and kidnap people with physical disabilities and bring them to Shenzhen, place them incrementally along the main road and then snatch all the money that people give them each day. I was appalled – how could this be? All the money I had given them, taken by greedy gangs? I still felt I needed to do something. If the money I gave them was just going to be stolen by a gang, then maybe if I gave them food, at least that would go into their malnourished stomachs. So for awhile anytime I bought baozi on the road for myself, I would buy a few extra and place them in a bag in the bowls of some of the beggars. But then something happened. I kept hearing the voice of my friend in my mind and how the beggars were all part of a scam. A scam…..in my mind I began to think that because my friend told me it was a scam, then it was ok not to give them anything anymore. Soon I gave neither money, nor food, and I made every effort not to look at the beggars as I walked past them, sometimes almost stumbling over them and still not looking them in the eye. I did not think twice about them and their awful situation in life. Sometimes they even seemed to me a nuisance when I was trying to traverse a crowded street and they were laying on the pavement where I needed to go.

What had happened to me? In my mind I was compassionate and caring and thoughtful and I cared about human rights. But over a period of mere weeks, I used an uncorroborated story told to me by a friend in order to justify not giving money or food to people in desperate need and even feel scorn for them! I, a self-professed compassionate person had conditioned myself not to feel for these people.

I could have tried to check to see if the story was true, I could have tried to talk to the people on the street. I did nothing. I stuck my hands in my pocket, my music into my ears and I drowned out the pain around me. I recognise now what I did and I am saddened by it. If I could so easily become insensitive to people in need based upon one story from one person, imagine what thoughtless and vengeful remarks told over and over again might do to other ordinary people.

Despite me realisation of my narrow-mindedness, I do not presently know how I should have acted. I should have kept trying to look them in the eye, for not doing so implies I think of them as something less than human, and surely they are not so. But giving them change might have helped them – maybe they were not part of this scam. But giving them money might have also aided this scam whereby people are plucked from their homes and hopelessly exploited to no profit of their own? Maybe giving food would have been best? What I do know is how I managed to justify doing absolutely nothing was wrong.

So in a lecture on how ordinary people can perpetrate terrible crimes, I was humbled in realizing that I, in the past, had managed to condition myself not to feel emotion for those in desperate need of help. I am ashamed that I chose not to feel.