“I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice.”  – Abraham Lincoln.

Milan Kundera wrote in The Unbearable Lightness Of Being  that there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weights so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.”

Compassion is not, for me, a debating point. You either feel it or you don’t. This morning, I was told the story of one of the refugee children who recently came to America, she was a young girl whose mother was so tortured by religious extremists that she set her self on fire and committed suicide. Her father disowned the girl, who he said was tainted by the mother’s refusal to obey him. It is a miracle that she is alive, and was taken in by some U.N. refugee workers and eventually, after two years alone in two different camps, was sent to America.

I thought of Kundera’s quote when I heard of this girl’s story. Someone cared for her, felt compassion and empathy for her, and saved her. You either  feel this or you don’t, no one can be argued into compassion, at least not in my experience. Sometimes they come to see it for themselves.

I am grateful for the U.S. Committee on Refugees and Immigration and their Amazon gift page, for this has given me a way to show compassion and support the moral principle on which our country was built. Morality was much inverted then, as now, but Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves, believed compassion and kindness was a moral principle of the world’s first democracy.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/wishlist/3LZNLT7J68TY7/ref=cm_sw_em_r_wsg_FVpGybH9EPC5X_wb