The ad in question stung me to my core. It was a heartrending experience, and I mean that. To the narration of the beautiful and eloquent Sarah McLachlan, my TV screen displayed pictures of unimaginable horror. Scarred faces, broken bodies, eyes that had been deliberately blinded and thousand yard stares we recall so well from photographs of the victims of atrocities. Not your usual public service advert, but one that exposed the raw cruelty of humankind and gently, implicitly demanded we do something about to correct it.
Still, the more I watched, the more troubled I became. Because I knew these pictures would touch many of my fellow Americans in ways that most public service announcements do not, and would no doubt increase contributions to the organization who had made the ad. Troubled not because I have anything against the fine organization which is running this ad. It’s a fine charity, one that is doing noble work to end the suffering of innocent victims of human cruelty.
No, what troubled me was the fact of the photographs themselves. For you see, the organization in question was the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, or ASPCA for short, and the pictures it displayed of suffering victims in need of our help were of dogs and cats, not people, not human beings.
Don’t misinterpret or misunderstand my point. I am against cruelty to animals, especially the type of cruelty I witnessed on my television last night, and I support the ASPCA. No creature should have to endure the forms of physical torture and abuse I witnessed in those photographs. No what bothered me was that I knew that this would be a very effective ad, one that would elicit an emotional response from thousands, perhaps millions of my fellow citizens.
People who are untouched by the plight of millions of children without health insurance, or by the anguish of people who have insurance but have been denied coverage for treatments that might have saved their lives. People who are immune to the vast suffering of the Iraqi people, who live under the threat of death from a myriad of sources every day. People who would just as soon shoot an “illegal alien” (or say they would), as offer to help them provide for their families. People who think millionaires deserve a tax cut of $287,000 while children in poverty deserve the equivalent of only $20 per child for their education.
People who think torture is acceptable and necessary, as long as it isn’t happening to them but to some unknown, nameless, faceless “terrorist” and who believe we should not look too deeply into those who conduct such torture on our behalf. People I know. People in my own family.
People who are unconcerned that American planes last week bombed a village in Iraq with over 100,000 pounds of explosives, a not uncommon occurrence these days. Bombing people from 10,000 feet above the ground is somehow perfectly acceptable behavior these days, even when it kills innocents, yet similar attacks delivered by our enemies without the benefit of military aircraft is somehow a heinous act.
I sometimes wonder why we don’t have a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Human Beings. But then, I imagine that even if we did, we’d never see an ad like the one ASPCA is running. No television network would run it, and if they did I doubt it would elicit the same level of sympathy that the ASPCA ad does. As a nation we can weep at the suffering of animals we keep as pets, but collectively it seems too many of us have hardened our hearts to the suffering of members of our own species, for whatever reason. We don’t blame the dogs and cats who suffered such abuse for their misery, so why do so many of us blame the victims of abuse, violence and neglect merely because they happen belong to that sub species of hominids referred to as homo sapiens sapiens?
Once upon a time a wise man told us “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.” Supposedly we are a nation which was founded in part on the moral and ethical teachings of this man, a nation many of whose citizens worship him as the Son of God. Yet we ignore his teachings. We love our pets. We feel sadness, even grief, and are moved to action at the sight of abused animals. We feel their pain. Why are so many Americans, even Christian Americans, so unable to transfer those same empathic impulses to their fellow human beings?
I have no answers. I wish the ASPCA all the best with their new ad campaign. I suspect it will be very effective. I just wish we lived in a world where the the human victims of abuse, violence, abandonment, poverty and cruelty evoked a response among all Americans at least equal to that which the pictures of these abused animals engender within us.
And I wish I understood all those who seemingly lack that empathy for the misery of their fellow human beings, even as they weep at the sight of these abused pets. I wish I understood those who call themselves Christians yet ignore on a daily basis the greatest commandment Jesus Christ ever gave us.
Maybe I expect too much.