Pat Taub
According to the 2025 Compassion Report from Sanford’s School of Medicine, only 1 in 3 Americans feel compassion for all groups of marginalized people.
Lindsay C. Gibson, author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents thinks that compassion for difficult parents can be a trap.
Author Lindsay C. Gibson
Trump’s massive cuts in social programs are seriously lacking in compassion.
Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, cites a widespread tendency among politicians and the media to whitewash Israel’s genocide in Gaza, lessening a compassionate response for what many consider ‘the worst genocide in modern times.’
El Akkad accuses mainstream media of employing passive language to minimize Israel’s genocidal crimes, citing the murder of the Palestinian child, 6-year-old Hind Rajab, trapped for hours in a car, surrounded by corpses of her family members. After Hind’s repeated calls for help, an ambulance finally arrived, only to have Israeli soldiers murder the ambulance workers and then riddle Hind’s car with 335 bullets.
Hind Rajab in her kindergarten graduation photo
This is how corporate media spun Hind’s murder: “A young lady collided with a bullet,” El Akkad insists this linguistic manipulation makes it easy to look away, reducing the reader’s discomfort, adding to our collapsing compassion.
How did we get to a place where compassion is collapsing?
An obvious culprit is our internet addiction. Americans of all ages are glued to their phones, laptops and streaming devices. Features like Instagram, YouTube, and celebrity news sites are designed to create an addictive response, to make people feel good, to deflect from a world increasingly highlighted by glaring income inequalities, attacks on free speech, scapegoating of migrants and the mounting genocide in Gaza.
Hand in hand with our internet addiction is the breakdown of community. Pre-internet many of us lived in close communities where we knew our neighbors, socialized with them, lent a hand when they needed childcare or when someone was sick. This lifestyle fostered compassion. The internet has greatly reduced our connections in real time, and by extension our compassionate responses.
Sherry Turkle, author of Reclaiming Conversation, found that today’s young people suffer from an empathy gap as a result of spending all their time on their phones, depriving them of real time conversations where they miss the cues of facial expressions: “When you can’t see a troubled expression in the other, it’s easy to overlook their feelings.”
Recently a friend declined my invitation to watch the Academy Award winning documentary, “No Other Land,” insisting she would find it too upsetting. I wish she hadn’t been so squeamish, because, while the film focused on Israel’s cruel demolition of homes in the West Bank, it generated compassion for the resilience of the affected families, who, used to being displaced, calmly and through brave tears, moved all their belongings into caves. All the while their loving family bonds were on full display.
My friend might have left the film, feeling better informed about life in Palestine, generating more compassion for all they endure, and motivated to read about their lives, rather than turning away from their stories. Compassion requires us to open our eyes and our hearts.
Growing compassion locally means participating in your community by building friendships with your neighbors, and volunteering for causes that build a healthy community: supporting the unhoused, abused women, migrant rights, and lobbying against cuts in medicare, social security, education, and other essential programs.
Compassion can be as simple and meaningful as extending a coffee invite to a lonely acquaintance or neighbor, or donating to a charity collecting clothing and household goods for migrants. If we each plant seeds of compassion, imagine the possibilities . . .
