Bearing Witness to Suffering
Can we learn to see ourselves in others?
There was a beautiful essay in last Sunday’s Denver post about Bearing Witness to Suffering. The piece by Denver’s Terrance Carrol was timely, insightful, and inspiring. He offered a remembrance of Martin Luther King as one who urged us all to "bear witness, look, believe, and act to end" the suffering of marginalized people. A disregarded population that was not included in the article, however, is the tragically ever-growing community of the vaccine injured and their families. Vaccine injury is real and is not rare. To paraphrase Carrol about other disenfranchised groups, we have adopted “the most expedient cognitive response”, disassociating ourselves from the reality of vaccine injury and denying the existence of its victims. There are tens of thousands of people who took vaccines or gave them to their child believing they were doing the right thing for themselves and society and are now dealing with horrible “unearned suffering” of unanticipated, adverse effects. They deserve to be witnessed, believed, and justly compensated.
On Tuesday, Mariann Budde, an Episcopal Bishop in Washington DC reflected some of these same sentiments when she encouraged President Trump to find, within himself, mercy and compassion for those who his policies will have a deleterious effect. She beseeched God to “grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love and walk humbly with each other and our God for the good of all people.” This shouldn’t be so difficult or controversial.
In these peculiar and conflicted times, the call for empathy and compassion must resonate with resolute clarity. Those of us whose sympathies may tend towards immigrants, minorities, and the neurodiverse, for example, might consider looking still deeper within ourselves and, for starts, discover some curiosity about the plights of the vaccine injured. Perhaps this inquisitiveness will lead to interest, then empathy, then understanding. Those of us whose values may lean more towards personal freedom, religion, and patriotism might consider exploring what secrets lay within the most profound core of our ideals. Perhaps in doing so, more compassion will reveal itself and in that compassion we may find shared fears and unifying hopes.
Can we learn to see ourselves in others? Can we normalize simple respect and kindness towards others rather than the common rush to judgement with the inevitable crash of misunderstanding and animosity? Can we profoundly respect the wonder that is within each of us – that IS each of us? Can we have the courage to see God in all of our fellow human beings?