The Challenge of Compassion

Over the past month I have been grappling with marginalization in the United States and how we as a society are perpetuating stigmas within our culture through policy and business practices out of a lack of compassion.
I am puzzled by American culture and how families are slowly scattering and moving apart. It seems like a cultural indicator that undermines our generational connectedness. Many retirees move to homogeneous communities where they have no family ties and grow old by themselves. The elderly within our communities are placed in homes and generally isolated from society. There is little integration and acceptance of the elderly. I feel that my generation is losing compassion for older generations. I am left wondering what implications this disconnection will have on our policy-making for the future. Of course health care is the most relevant public policy. The mental models around the elderly are divisive for our society. We have much to learn from other cultures’ embrace of their elders. The value of wisdom, story-telling, understanding and history has to some extent been lost in modern culture. This has larger implications on how we function as a society and how we develop our priorities.
The baby boomers will soon be the elderly and a considerable portion of the US population. In some ways I believe that our need for health care reform is distracting from the need to care for ourselves and as a society take responsibility for our friends and family who are aging. It takes an enormous amount of resources to care for an aging population. This is an environmental, social and cultural dilemma. Compassion, however is only part of the solution.
The social stigmas around mental illness and disabilities are many. Growing up with an uncle with Bi-polar disorder, my Grandparents experienced great shame for his illness. For many years we didn’t have resources to learn about his illness, and we were unaware that many others were suffering from the same battle. When I walk the streets of Portland, I am continually struck by the number of individuals who are wandering alone, with mental illnesses. Why have we failed as a society to care for these individuals? And why does the only solution become isolation from the rest of society? I believe we have succeeded in “othering” and failed to embrace a community of people who cannot help themselves. The importance is Social Ventures is paramount in addressing the inequities of people dealing with mental illnesses.
The biggest question is how can we move from charity to philanthropy with these causes? I see charity as a band-aid mentality for social well-being. However the notion of philanthropy seems to have stronger cultural implications and social initiatives are more engrained in compassion. Currently if we continue to marginalize people with mental illnesses and disabilities we cannot move forward toward equity.
Continuing on the thread of charity and philanthropy in the United States, I would argue that they are both derived out of compassion. In fact, my dollar given to a man on the street will not have the same lasting impacts as a dollar given to an organization that has organized philanthropic efforts. Thus, compassion alone is not enough to drive social justice with these marginalized communities. To a larger extent I think we are lacking the skills to proactively engage and learn from our elders and from the disabled community. If we can break down these walls of disconnection we can form a more cohesive society that is better equipped to handle other challenges over time.