Look Away, Look Away

We lived, as usual, by ignoring. Ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
~ from The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood ~

We live in a world with a lot of ugliness and vulgarities. If we focused 24/7 on all this pettiness, subjugation and misery, it would lead the average person to great despair. Consequently, as a self-preservation measure, we teach ourselves to ignore.

Sure, we may understand much of the evil that permeates human civilization on an intellectual level, but we try to shield our heart as much as possible. No one -- with the exception of masochists -- wants to be tied up in knots all the time. We don't want to spend each day feeling the pain of others, so we devise various mechanisms to keep our mind occupied with less negative things.

But it takes a lot of work to keep the shield up. We have to be diligent to avoid confronting disquieting truths. We have to become so self-absorbed that there isn't much room for outside information to poke through.

And, of course, there is great danger involved. While it is important to shield our heart to some extent, we can go too far. We can get to the point in which we don't give a flip about anyone's life but our own. When this occurs, we lose the ability for compassion and, where compassion is lacking, so too is humaneness.

We each walk a tightrope. We train ourselves to look away, but no so far that we can't cast occasional glances over our shoulder. When we get to the point that we can neither empathize nor sympathize with our fellow beings, we are lost. If we continue on in this direction, we often can't find our way back and we remain lost forever.