This morning, I started to write a radically different article. After a painful U.S. election, I wanted to issue a call to action and a plea for hope in the face of what seemed like utter hopelessness. The first paragraph quoted Emma Lazarus and the second lamented Arizona’s passage of Proposition 314. Frustration poured onto the page. Then I got an email. My friend died this afternoon.
The world had seemed so loud for the past 24 hours, and everything suddenly went quiet. I couldn’t breathe. I wondered how I could have worried about an election as my friend passed away. If I thought the world was falling apart while votes were being counted, I was wrong. I had missed a bigger picture—this was what the world falling apart felt like.
I wondered what else I missed that day and pulled up global news headlines. As it would turn out, 89 people remained missing in Spain after catastrophic floods. Ukraine reported its first encounter with North Korean troops in Kursk. Mozambique is wracked by post-election protests and may deploy soldiers in response.
In the fear of personal problems, it is easy to forget the horrific crises going on around the world. Our immediate fears and struggles matter deeply, but we cannot afford to forget others are experiencing their own fears and struggles. Many assume the opposite of fear is courage, but I propose an alternative. Compassion is the best counter to fear, and we need more of it in our world right now.
We make decisions in our lives every day to care for others. It is easy to care about our loved ones because they are so close to us. Our moral communities teach us to care for one another, and we express varying degrees of compassion and respect for the people we encounter each day. The problem we often struggle with is extending that compassion to an imagined stranger. We should not deny the importance of our personal connections, but we also need to recognize the basic connection of shared humanity with those we’ve yet to meet.
Every community passes down explanations of why humans must care for others, especially the most vulnerable. For a principle to guide global society, it must apply evenly across a broad range of beliefs or perspectives. Conveniently, many traditions preach compassion as a core foundation for human behavior. It lives in Christ’s universal love or the Hindu karuṇā that urges care for others. Let me be clear—I am not advocating for a universal set of morals or beliefs. Instead, I am suggesting something at the heart of our shared humanity allows us to connect with others. That common core of compassionate connection needs to be the starting point for decisions we make that impact others—namely, government policy.
Unfortunately, fear drives a lot of policy in our current global political culture. Xenophobia is embedded so deeply in discourse that we often don’t realize how it shapes the questions guiding policies, particularly around immigration and asylum. Political culture discusses immigration in terms of whether we feel threatened by the admission of refugees and immigrants. We ask if more hospitable immigration policies will harm the economy or bring violence to our doors. These are the wrong questions. Instead, we must consider why people flee their homes and what they endure to do so. Our treatment of displaced persons must acknowledge their strength, agency, and lived experience. We have to ask ourselves what our responsibilities are to others on only the grounds of our shared humanity.
In fear, I wrapped myself in a cloak of anger, but such emotions cut us off from one another. It takes far more courage to communicate and listen with compassion than to throw up walls against anyone we perceive as different. It’s hard to pursue an identity as a citizen of a large global community when distance allows us to forget our common identity as human beings. But I still believe we can do it. We will because we must. If compassionate connection holds us together in a global community, then I hope to find the strength to try to understand both those I love and those I have yet to meet.
