Posts Tagged ‘compassion’

Courtesy & Common Sense

Monday, February 1st, 2010


Last week I wrote about Haiti and our need to be shocked to get involved.  I began thinking about what it takes for Americans to get involved in general; to make a difference.  My son came home from school talking about a video clip he watched at school on ABC’s “What would you do?”  We like to think of ourselves as people who would help when needed.  But as this show so poignantly points out, in the moment, we don’t always act in the way we would ultimately like or in ways that really reflect our values. Unfortunately, we judge subconsciously more than we realize. Take a moment to watch the following video:

By reflecting us as we are rather than how we would like to be or to see ourselves, this video gives us a great opportunity…an opportunity to pause and think about our connectedness to one another and to be able to easily make more compassionate choices in our everyday encounters.  By doing that, it becomes automatic to lend a hand.  No need for the shock value.  When courtesy, compassion, awareness and caring of others well-being is not considered ‘a savior’ as mentioned in this story, but as everyday common sense and decency, all of our lives are enriched.

What if this were the fabric of our society?

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“Hate” is a four letter word… at least in my house!

Monday, January 4th, 2010


Words are powerful. Ask my kids about our house rules on words. It is actually a pretty long list. We do not believe in censorship, but we do believe that words are powerful and some words can have an insidious negative effect…one that you see later – like seeds that, only when they grow, do you see the full bloom.

Hate is one of those words. It is everywhere. It is so ubiquitous we don’t pay much attention to it. Except in my house. We jolt when we hear it. For us, hate is a four-letter word and something that we do not want in our lives. By definition hate is “intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury / a feeling of dislike so strong that it demands action”. Even if you don’t use the word in that way, it is still being used and has that energy.

We feel that a ‘hate crime’ is a special kind of crime – it comes from an emotion – hate – that allows the better part of ourselves to be overridden. It is not the same emotion alluded to when we say “we hate vegetables”, which we may really dislike or even detest. We have laws about hate – crimes, but very little clarity about what that really means.

Does hate have a place in your home? What is that place? By watering down the word ‘hate’ we have less opportunity to really discuss what it is, and therefore, less language to combat it. It leaves no room for compassion, tolerance, mercy, forgiveness or peace.
What kind of change would you see in your surroundings if you removed the word ‘hate’ from your vocabulary? Try it and see how your view changes.

“Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.

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