Compassion Overload

O’Shaughnessey rarely comes around these days but when he has a gripe. This day he sits snorting his tea from a shot-glass and biting angrily into a biscuit. Occasionally, he mutters a “Hmph!” or growls and scowls. He never does this unless he’s expecting me to ask what is bothering him and I very rarely ask quickly enough.
I usually set out a child’s bentwood chair for his visits, but small though it is, it’s still too large for a leprechaun and his feet dangle a six inches from the floor, which causes him a certain restlessness as he tries to get comfortable, crossing first one leg and then the other and continually straightening his coat and brushing non-existent crumbs from it, twisting and turning, propping his elbow on the arm of the chair and resting his chin first on the palm of his hand and then on his fist, all the while keeping up such a cacophony of grunts, whistles and sniffs as to annoy even so even tempered a man as I.
I know his game. He wants to make sure I’m still aware of him and not, as it appears at the moment, totally absorbed in my new copy of the Christian Science Monitor. It’s a game we play when he is in a particularly pugnacious mood.
“I see here where they’re lifting the economy of Svetlantia by weaving hats out of banana leaves,” I say.
“Are they indeed?” he answers, sinking further into his chair and crossing his ankles while stuffing his hands into his pockets.
“It is a fact. Now that’s ambition and self reliance. It’s an example to all the rest of us.”
“Hrmph.”
“All right,” I said finally, folding the paper over the arm of my own chair. “Out with it.”
“Out with what?”
“Whatever it is that’s crawled up your nose. I know it’s something, for you never attack your biscuit with such violence unless you’re flustered by something.”
“Well, it’s grand of you to notice, that it is. It only took you, what, twenty minutes? Truly, I can get more sympathy out of the skunk living under the porch of the church across the street than I can get out of you who purports to be my friend, though it is a mystery to me how you can …”
“You’ve already wasted three quarters of a minute.”
“Have I then? Have I indeed? Well let me tell you…
“Now it’s a full minute. If you don’t get on with it, I’m going back to my paper.”
O’Shaughnessey clapped his hands together and rubbed them as though sanding off his calluses. “Well then, this is it. You know I have always been perplexed by your kind. You do the most confounded things! More often than not you go about your business as if you wanted to …”
“What is it now?” I asked with a sigh, for I knew he was about to launch into a tiresome criticism of one or another of our perfectly human idiosyncrasies.
“It’s that very thing. You go about your business without a concern in the world for what’s important. You and your highly touted self reliance! Now take the …I saw today a sight I’d never have seen in the old days.”
“By the old days you mean…”
“A thousand years or so, give or take a century or two.”
“Yeah, well y’see, to me the old days are a little more recent, say fifty years.”
“Well, that’s your limitation, not mine. But let me get on with it.”
“Please.”
“I saw a poor woman sitting on the side-walk with a child of about two and they were begging. She had a paper cup in her hands and was saying over and over again “Spare some change for the child, spare some change for the child…”
“That’s common, though not usually with a child. They do that sometimes when they want to beg a little more sympathy. If there’s a child, people are more apt to give them…”
O’Shaughnessey interrupted me with some heat. “Common, is it? How common? So common that they become part of the landscape, no more noticeable than a stone in the path or a crack in the pavement? I am amazed! That beggar and her child were as invisible to most people who passed her by as I am. Most of them reacted as if her presence were an insult! And you call yourselves a civilization! Would you explain that to me?”
“We are embarrassed by them.”
“What! Have you no compassion, no empathy?”
“We are all too aware that it could well be ourselves on that sidewalk. Our security is an illusion. It makes us want to ignore the reality of…”
“Ach! You are a barbaric people, truly you are,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“And in the old days…?”
The leprechaun grew pensive, as if weighing his words carefully, sipped a little more tea, and then looking toward the ceiling, said, “In the old days when our people (by which he meant the Gentry) were in the ascendancy, every person in the village was treated as kin; every child was a child of the village and they would no more allow them to fall into beggary than they would drown them in the lake. Justice was not a matter of the law alone, but a matter of right doing.”
“So, what would they do, these villagers?”
“Treat her like family. Take her and her child in, give them a bed and work to do and a place at the table. For I tell you that the beggar in the street was not an embarrassment to any one of them but a shame to all of them that they would allow it! They wouldn’t walk past her unthinking, unfeeling and intentionally unaware.” He sniffed sharply and snapped his biscuit “And you call them barbarians!”
I leaned forward and tapped the palm of my hand with my finger to make a point. “But, what about individual responsibility and rights and self reliance?”
“What about them?
“It is self reliance and individual initiative that makes progress, invention, innovation.”
O’Shaughnessey grinned sardonically. “What are they for? What is the use of this progress if it makes you self absorbed, uncaring and concerned only with your own profit? Where is your compassion?”
“O’Shaughnessey, we are not divine creatures; we have our limitations. I said beggars were common, more common than I remember. There’s one on every corner and every alcove. After awhile we suffer from compassion overload.”
“Oh, I feel for you! Suffering, you are! Of compassion overload, you call it? Well, I all it barbarism! Would you feel the same way if it were you on those street corners and alcoves begging for enough to keep you alive for another day? Would you, in her place, not grow to hate those who pass by without a bit of notice? Indeed, I think you would. And I ask you, is anything that causes such hopelessness and hatred good? Individuality my left shoe-buckle! You all should be ashamed!”
With that, he launched himself from his chair and made to leave.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“I’m going to take tea with better company,” he said, huffily. “It’s been ages since I last visited O’Sullivan, and I’m due.”
And with that, he removed his tricorn hat from the fireplace tool stand where he had perched it, slid down from his chair and disappeared, leaving his half drunk tea and a few crumbs as the only evidence that he had ever been there.
I took his words to heart, but I doubt I will change how I act much. I am, after all, only human.