Every time I hear another Republican echo the Bush brothers and speak of the GOP becoming the party of "compassionate conservatism," the same image comes to mind:
A group of white folks (wearing very nice clothes and pained looks on their faces) stand on a sidewalk around a dirty, disheveled homeless family and chant: "We really feel sorry for you -- but it wouldn't be prudent to help."Do any of the compassionate conservatives know what the word "compassion" actually means? I ask because I've noticed that most of them began using the term only after Nov. 3.
That's when they saw many "Big Tent" Republicans tank while the increasingly compassionate George W. Bush swept to his second term as governor in Texas and the born-again compassionate Jeb Bush swept to his first in Florida. (Campaigning for the same job in 1994, Jeb Bush was asked what he would do to help African Americans, and he answered, "Probably nothing.")
Compassion is such a pure and noble word, I'd hate to think anyone would co-opt it, rob it of its meaning for generations to come, just so a troubled political party can have a catchy new slogan.
Compassion comes from the Latin, com, which means "together" and pati, which means "to suffer." Suffer together.
Together means not behind electronic gates that open only to specially coded card keys issued to you and your neighbors. Together means with people other than the guys in your fraternity at Dartmouth, your business school class at Stanford or the couples in your tennis and golf club.
Together means with psychotic people who dwell on the street and Vietnamese immigrants who live eight to a room in lousy neighborhoods. It means with people who've worked hard their whole lives but never earned enough to set aside money for their kids' education. It means with those people's kids who can't make enough at a minimum wage job to meet the ever rising tuition at even a local community college.
Together means with old people who are being victimized by a combination of profit-driven HMOs and the rapidly fraying Medicare system. It means with children on welfare who get no increased benefits when their parents' monthly payment is reduced as an "incentive" to finding employment.
It means with teenage runaways who are addicted to drugs and alcohol but whose only chance at salvation is the rare rehab program offered after a stay in the county jail. It means with paroled recovering junkies who, reunited with their children, can't get vouchers for food and milk because Congress took such privileges away from convicted drug felons.
In an article in the Oct. 19 New Yorker by Joe Klein, Jeb Bush is quoted during an address to a West Palm Beach women's group.
"In the past," said Bush, "we've defined compassion by how much money we've spent and how many rules we've enacted, instead of by results. But true compassion means suffering with the poor and acting on the consciousness of your suffering -- and we should shift power away from the bureaucracy to the people in the compassionate community, who actually deal with these problems."
Bush went on to advocate that we use the same approach for "dealing with problems like foster care or education" that we use for building highways: "We contract out with experts."
It all sounds so caring -- and prudent.
When Bill Clinton's party was reorganizing and scrambling to regain power, he talked a great deal about suffering with the poor and marginalized and acting on the consciousness of one's suffering. Mercifully, he never used the term "compassion," opting instead for "I feel your pain."
As Clinton demonstrated in his colossal sellout to old-style Republican "welfare reform," his empathetic pain threshold is rather low. Why would I expect any better from people who speak with straight faces about paying "the compassionate community" to practice its expert, results-driven suffering and to "deal with these problems" for all the rest of us?
Scripps Howard News Service