A WIDESPREAD DISEASE CALLED CRUELTY

Several months ago prosecutors in Cocoa, Florida declined to press charges against a group of heartless young men who stood idly by a pond’s edge and watched a disabled man drown.  As the drowning man floundered in the water in a desperate attempt to reach safety, the young men videotaped his last terrifying moments on earth without offering assistance.  Instead, they laughed at the dying man and joked about his misfortune.  Charges were not filed in Florida because cruelty is not illegal in the Sunshine State.  It’s not illegal in most other places either, which is probably why so many people give so little thought to the cruelty their actions and policies wreak.

Cruelty is primarily born of ignorance, so it’s worth noting that according to Webster’s Dictionary, cruelty is defined as “a desire to cause others to suffer, the quality or state of being cruel, and actions that cause suffering.”  It is also worth noting that people aren’t born cruel.  Cruelty is a learned behavior, and children can learn to be cruel just as easily as they can learn to be kind.  That’s why it’s important for children to be taught early in life to recognize cruelty in all its forms and take steps to avoid it.

People say the world is a cruel place, as if that’s the natural state of our existence, but that viewpoint ignores the reality that life is largely what we make of it, and most if not all of the cruelty we experience is caused by human beings. 

Why does cruelty matter?  It matters because cruelty is a festering cancer that eats away at a person’s sense of compassion and their ability to empathize with fellow human beings.  Left unchecked, cruelty destroys a person’s humanity, and when it metastasizes beyond the individual and starts infecting large segments of society, that society’s health and well-being are gravely endangered.

Desiring others to suffer is the easiest form of cruelty to recognize, especially when the person or group or government that harbors that desire carries out a grandiose display of violence that reaches out and grabs our attention.  It would be a mistake, however, to think that cruelty is limited to the dictators and despots and terrorists of the world.  We all have our moments when we’d like to see others suffer, especially in situations where the target of our ire has wronged us, committed a horrible atrocity or harmed children.  Plus, it’s easy to confuse cruelty with punishment.  There’s a difference between the two.

Webster’s second definition of cruelty - the quality or state of being cruel – sounds like a no-brainer to recognize, but people often lose sight of their own cruelty when they believe actions  justify it.  To this point James William Fulbright, noted U.S. Senator and humanitarian once observed, “In the name of noble purposes men have committed unspeakable acts of cruelty against one another.”  Fulbright was right.  In World War II, the Nazis claimed national interests justified their murdering six million Jews.  Today, ISIS, al Qaeda and the Taliban routinely justify their cruel displays of murder and mayhem as acts in service to God.  Nor is America immune from cruelty.  In the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, American agents routinely tortured prisoners of war and justified the cruelty with claims that it saved millions of lives.  Cruelty prevails because it’s easily rationalized. 

The third form of cruelty – actions that cause others to suffer – is the most prevalent, but also the most ignored.  That’s because people minimize their own role in causing others to suffer.  Rationalization helps, too.

Now that we know what cruelty is, it’s time to recognize the vast amount of cruelty that surrounds us and own up to the role we play in allowing cruelty to propagate.  It’s cruel to rip children from the arms of their parents and lock them in cages (12,800 as of this past August) for following a mom or dad across a line in the sand.  It’s cruel to mock the disabled for the crosses they bear in life.  It’s cruel to denigrate the sacrifices of soldiers, just as it is to devalue the humanity of one’s adversaries.  It’s cruel to take food from the mouths of the hungry.  It’s cruel to prevent the sick from access to medical care.  It’s cruel to deprive the elderly of their dignity in the waning years of their lives.  It’s cruel to sexually molest children, just as it is to tolerate or sweep it under the rug.  It’s cruel to leave a child suffocating in a car on a hot summer day with the windows closed, and it’s equally cruel to suffocate future generations with an atmosphere too heated and polluted to breathe.  It’s cruel to poison a person’s food or drink, and it’s just as cruel to do so on a global scale.

We see, hear, and read about cruelty on a daily basis, and maybe the constant bombardment has desensitized us to the pain and anguish cruelty creates, but being oblivious to cruelty is not an acceptable excuse when it comes to the suffering of fellow human beings.  Like it or not, we are our brother’s keeper.