there's a limit to your love.

Why is it that people think there is some kind of quantifiable limit to the compassion and care an individual or society can have? And that to care about one thing necessarily presupposes that you do not care at all about other issues?


I read an article recently that really brought the insanity of this kind of thinking to the fore. The piece is by Kon Karapanagiotidis, CEO of the Victiorian Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (and contender for one of the hardest-to-pronounce surnames in the country), and it elucidates a disturbing pattern he has noticed in people's responses to asylum seekers during times of local tragedy and disaster.

If you are interested, you can read it here (and I recommend you do*), but the general gist of it is that in the aftermath of both the Victorian bushfires and the recent floods in Queensland, Kon received an influx of hate mail detailing what people thought of as his misplaced compassion for refugees when "real" Australians needed help.

This snippet from the article might give you a general idea:

In the aftermath of the Victorian bushfires I received endless emails questioning why, when everyday Australians are battling bushfires, we are ‘paying illegals four times what a pensioner gets and they live it up in four star hotels while our people go homeless'.

What stuck out for me was not so much how baseless this was (asylum seekers have no access to any form of Centrelink and are 120 times more likely to be homeless than the average Australian), but that it comes at such a time and is the first thought in some people's minds after horrific events.

As you can see, the article highlights something that is hugely problematic with this whole issue: and that is, that a lot of us are completely misinformed about asylum seekers. There are some really informative myth-busting fact sheets available from refugee advocacy groups that effectively explain some of the misconceptions (which I will detail at another time), but unfortunately such information often only reaches those who actively seek it out. Until the mainstream media actually does its job and delivers sound information people will continue to base their opinions on sensationalised stories with little in the way of objective information.

When I read the article, I found it difficult and almost maddening to imagine what could provoke someone to sit down and write a hateful letter or email to the CEO of a humanitarian organisation during a time of tragedy. The only possible explanation that I could think of is that these people are somehow affronted by the compassion being shown to asylum seekers, seeing it as an offence to the 'real' Australians (whatever that means) in need of help. But since when did caring about something (and in Kon's case, working for that cause) mean that your capacity to care about and indeed help in other situations was somehow diminished??

Perhaps I am alone in this, but it seems ludicrous to genuinely think that if someone like Kon cares deeply about one issue (the welfare of asylum seekers) that this somehow automatically presupposes that he has no capacity to care about another issue (the Australians effected by the natural disasters). To me this makes no sense whatsoever.

I know this has already turned into a fairly substantial rant (well done if you have made it this far!) but I also want to note that, in my own experience at least, the opposite has always proven true. That is, the more I have come to care about an issue, the more I have come to care about, well, everything else too. Becoming a vegetarian is a case in point: both myself and my boyfriend noticed that once we started thinking about questions of animal welfare and the like, that our interest and concern 'spread', as it were, to other areas too. Questions naturally lead to more questions, and suddenly these supposedly separate "issues" that we were starting to genuinely care about (eg. animal welfare, looking after the natural environment, human rights) no longer seemed so discrete and delineated, but actually very related.

So maybe with compassion it isn't at all a matter of "reaching capacity" and giving to some but not others, but rather, something that actually grows the more you feel it and practice it. Because ultimately, isn't compassion an active way of extending yourself for someone else? From a place of love? I really don't think there is a limit to that.

* but try and avoid the mostly xenophobic reader's comments at the end of the article, unless you want to give yourself indigestion as I almost did.

(Original image, by themuccibird. Please do not reproduce without permission)