There has been a spate of posts on Twitter recently that start with, “I have absolutely no sympathy for....”
These tweets are usually about people dealing with Covid consequences, or migrants but there has been a huge rise in them recently.
“Why do people have to be so horrible?” my daughter asked, as she read a tweet from an editor of a national online newsgroup.
The tweet said, “I’d love to see some polling on how much public sympathy there is out there for people who went on holiday and got caught up in the quarantine measures. Is there any?”
This tweet sounds like it could be a simple request from a journalist to capture the mood of the public but maybe it was to push a thought this person already had. A thought that you shouldn’t be sympathetic to anyone who went on holiday.
The replies were almost unanimously that there was no sympathy. How could someone take a holiday in a pandemic, anyway? They shouldn’t have gone. Quarantine was inevitable.
Then people started to say that they would reserve their sympathy for those that they felt deserved it. Maybe doctors or nurses, or families that had lost loved ones.
Since when was sympathy a finite resource? You can feel sympathy for as many people as you want to. No emotion is finite. If a mini cut you up on a roundabout immediately after a BMW had pulled out of a turning in front of you then the anger you feel wouldn’t be less. You wouldn’t shout and beep your horn at the BMW but say to the mini, “I would be cross but I’ve used up my quota of anger for today,” In fact you’re are likely to be more angry. You don’t say to your third born child, “Oh I’m sorry, I would love you but there were two before you and I’ve just run out of love.”
All emotions are the same. The more you practise them, the better you get at them.
Now, back to this thorny question of sympathy for people returning from holiday and having to quarantine. Any instinct to say you have no sympathy comes out of fear. Yes, I know, you are feeling cross with me now. I’m not frightened, you think. It’s just that I knew it wasn’t safe to take a holiday so I cancelled mine. I was wise. I made the right choices. But you see, what if you had made choices that you thought were right and they turned out to be wrong? What if you believed the government when they said it was fine to go to Spain? That’s the fear you are feeling that has reduced our capacity for sympathy. We know that, as the pigeons keep telling me, life is precarious. At the moment, it is even more uncertain. With a government that doesn’t seem to have a clear handle on the situation, an already broken health system, a plummeting economy, looming Brexit and a virus that is refusing to just remember it has been in Dominic Cummings and go away, we can see how fragile our carefully crafted lives are. However, if we can just convince ourselves that our good fortune is because we worked hard, or made the right choices then we don’t have to think about how it could all get taken away.
Practising sympathy will make you a nicer person but it will also make you more fearful. So, now that I’ve written this blog, I now have sympathy for all the people who say they have no sympathy because I know they are just a bit scared, which has made me even more anxious. Oh help! I’ve got to go, there’s a pigeon at my door.
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