I hope you’ll indulge that I read Nicholas Kristof a lot, and because of the themes of his pieces, share them here. But they’re so good, I can’t help it.
His piece today on the famine in Somalia and it’s terrible effects highlighted in particular the violence many experience as they flee to Kenya. Robbery and rape are frequent, sometimes affecting the same family multiple times on their journey.
The close of the piece, though, was this: “Americans also suffer from compassion fatigue.” There’s truth to that; in a world with no shortage of serious issues to learn about, care about, and act on, it can be overwhelming. But I hope we would all take a free moment on a Sunday afternoon to consider what we would allow to happen to other people simply “because they lost the same lottery of birth that all of us won.”
To that end, here are some brief pieces on various compassion issues, which each have the potential to revive us from our fatigue:
- Kristof’s Op-Ed: On Top of Famine, Unspeakable Violence
- Also on the crisis in Turkana, Kenya: Words Fail
- On gang intervention: Til the Wheels Fall Off
- On the Israeli and Palestinian Peacemaking Process: Resources for Peacemakers
- On micro-finance: Sewing Her Way Out of Poverty
