Writing, thinking, politicking, speaking openly in America these days brings all of us into almost daily contact with outrage. I see Outrage Addiction as an epidemic national disease, and there is no vaccine for it. Sometimes I think we are becoming a nation of outrage addicts, drunk on our new world of social media, where outrage is the addict’s dream and choice. It is free, simple, unending and you don’t even have to get up off of your butt or leave your house to take it.

Outrage and rage are powerful spiritual tools for me, they challenge me every day not to become what I hate and dislike. They force me to define who I am and who I wish to be.

I watched as much of the debates as I could, and I was struck by the outrage expressed in almost every candidate’s belief and expression. Outrage seems to be the fuel of our political system, left and right, and it is definitely the drink of choice on Facebook and Twitter, the new barometers of our seething national psyche.

In the animal world, we are confronted with outrage almost every single day. The animal rights movement and many people who call themselves animal lovers breathe outrage, share it, prowl the Internet like the priests of the Inquisition, looking for ways to hate and judge and condemn people. Increasingly, our own loneliness and disconnection brings us to see all animals as needy and dependent and abused creatures in desperate need of our protection and ever hateful of the people we see as mistreating them. In a growing sense, animals exist to soothe us and make us feel better.

I guess I have wearied of outrage, I never liked it, only rarely feel it and see it mostly as a tool for  needy people to try and feel superior to others and better about themselves. I am happy to leave it behind.

My late donkey Simon taught me much about the meaning of compassion in his life and death, especially about how difficult it is. If you pay attention to the messages on Facebook – I try to when I can, they are revealing in so many ways – you will see that it’s like the way Jesus Christ is processed in our culture. everyone loves to invoke his name but very few people understand his beliefs or want to follow them. Something about outrage is necessary for people, it seems be essential to their identity. I think at the core, it’s a way of feeling sorry for oneself and superior to others.

For needy, empty, battered or abused people, that can be important. Social  media makes it quite simple, as the family of the famed dentist Dr. Palmer – the killer of Cecil the Lion learned. Thousands of righteous people thought it not only appropriate but a moral duty to threaten his wife, children, patients and employees with death, invasion of privacy, the hacking of their personal information because of what the doctor had done.

Outrage is not thoughtful or merciful, it is new kind of mob, a life force all of it’s own, it cannot  make distinctions between one person or another.

On my Facebook Page, hundreds of people argued that Gandhi and Jesus Christ would have done the same thing as the digital mobs did because they were animal lovers and everybody knows if you are an animal lover, hating and abusing people is almost a sacred obligation.

Yesterday – and very knowingly, I ran into the Outrage Addicts again, as happens almost every time you mention compassion. It is out of favor. People see it as a hare-brained, wimpering and weak-minded thing to evoke.

Saturday, II wrote a piece on the blog about a horse kill buyer I have been communicating with (he buy horses at auctions to be sent to slaughter.

I am not so dumb or blind that I did not expect to catch it for the piece and I am not bothered by the anger it provoked. Writing a sympathetic piece about a horse kill buyer in the middle of the animal world in our time is the literal equivalent of heresy, I am lucky I wasn’t alive and blogging during the Inquisition or in Salem, I doubt I would be here this morning.

Compassion is a difficult thing, we tend to reserve it for good and nice people, we hate to grant it to bad people or people we don’t like. They, of course, are the ones who need it the most.

Outrage is distasteful to me, especially when it comes from cowardly people sitting behind computer screens,  but it also doesn’t do society or animals much good. Like hate, outrage never accomplishes much, it has never solved a single problem or helped a needy human being or animal.

We have lost moral reason and perspective when it comes to animals. The hatred and rage spewed at John, a kill buyer in the Midwest was much more hateful than thoughtful, that is the way self-righteousness works. And it keeps us from looking at the real problem

People who say they love animals have lobbied, harassed, and pressured the slaughterhouses in America out of existence in the name of being humane. More than 1550,000 horses are taken to slaughter each year in America. There are way too many horses without homes or people who can care for them. The animal rights movement is eager to add to the tally by driving working horses on farms and in cities out of their jobs and safe homes by banning and banishing them. Before the U.S. slaughterhouses closed, horses were taken to nearby facilities and killed quickly.

Now, they are loaded onto trailers and trains and shipped long and brutal distances to Canada and Mexico where almost all of them have nails drilled through their heads. Are the people responsible for this horrible suffering really moral or superior to John,  the kill buyer, who is doing his job, feeding his family and trying to live his life?

If John does not buy horses for slaughter, what is supposed to happen to the 150,000 horses with no place to go, no jobs to work in, no rescue farms or preserves that have the room or money to take them? Who is less moral, the people responsible for sending these animals to dreadful suffering or the people bidding on them and doing the paperwork? You decide, I am not yet wise enough to sit on judgement on John.

I think of the hundreds of elephants soon to go to slaughter when they are driven from the circuses and have nowhere to go as people who call themselves animal lovers celebrate another “victory” over hateful human beings.

To love outrage, you must cast aside humility as well as compassion. You must shed empathy and the very idea of human connection.  Last night, I got this message from a woman named Deborah Jett McVay, she was bristling with indignation over my piece on John:

“Pre-FB, the only venue would have a newspaper/magazine for this article. What would have been my response then? Much the same, I think. I would have written a letter to the editor. In the future I would not read follow up articles. Perhaps that is the position I will take in the future. I will initially glean the article posted, if it’s about this ‘gentleman,’ I simply won’t read it. He may be worth your time, Jon, but not mine.”

Deborah, here’s an even better idea. Go somewhere else, spare both of us your angst.

Deborah says it isn’t worth her time to read about John, someone she is inclined to dislike. In the future, she simply won’t take the time to read it. But she will take the time to post a message on Facebook saying that she hasn’t got the time to read it, and is disgusted with me for giving John a minute of thought or an ounce of attention. I used to be a newspaper editor, and she is lucky I am not still one, she would have gotten a letter in return that she would not have liked.

This is an important issue for me, because in my work, writing and thinking I confront outrage every day in one way or another – all of us do in the new and very public world of politics and media – and the way in which I think and feel about it will define me (and you perhaps) as a human being. Those of you who have been reading me know perhaps I am no woo-woo spouting squishy spiritual cant. That is the lazy person’s way of dismissing feeling and sympathy – it is always portrayed as weakness when it is, to me, strength.

This is important because it speaks to what I call an attitude of the heart. I wrote the piece about John because I wished to experience him as a human being, not as an object caricature or creation of technology and media, someone conjured up for me to hate. It is so easy to send a nasty message and hit send we lose any sense that there is a human being much like us on the other end of the message.  I am done with using animals as an excuse for hating and judging people, it is repulsive and unacceptable to me. If we can’t see John as a human being – whether or not we like what he is doing – then how can we know ourselves?

John and I are not so very different. We are both trying to figure things out, trying to get by in the best way we can.

Outrage speaks to an imbalance within us, a disease of the soul. I do not believe I can cultivate a satisfying and meaningful life without being at peace with myself. I am not a prisoner, I hope, of the left or the right, but I was struck watching the presidential debates by their pervasive sense of fury and outrage, how differences between people and differences of opinion quickly become grounds for hatred and fury, for personalizing and demonizing differences. Outrage is the drug of the Outrage Addicts on both sides of our new and hateful civic system. It is the poison spawn of the the left and the right.

When all is said and done,  I don’t want to be an Outrage Addict, I don’t  want that addiction, I don’t care to be one of those people who make me so uncomfortable, and who are so angry at my refusal to join in the bloody dance.  Outrage requires us to hate and fear the people who reject rage as an ideology. I don’t want to become what I dislike, or even hate.

So it’s really quite simple. I won’t.

I want to keep talking to people like John the Kill Buyer, I wish to never lose my sense of wonder for a deeper understanding of life, mine and theirs and the ability to walk in the shoes of other people. That is really what compassion is all about. We are, in fact, at a crossroads. We will learn to live together in harmony or we will perish together in outrage and conflict.