Fighting Compassion Fatigue

Tired of giving until it hurts? Sick of hearing about the world’s problems every night on the news? Yes? Well, don’t give up on being compassionate yet!

The response to the Boxing Day tsunami was remarkable. In Australia—and the response was similar in many other places around the world—there were various appeals, telethons, concerts, sporting events and countless smaller, local fundraisers. Private donations and fundraising in Australia totalled around $A250 million within just a few weeks of this disaster—record giving and heartfelt generosity, by any measure.

But a month later, as the story was beginning to fade from the media, newspapers reported that charities were bracing themselves for a difficult year, a year in which most people’s generosity had been used up by the end of January. For many aid organisations sustaining public interest in the wake of the tsunami has been a challenge. One organisation attempted to prompt us beyond our tsunami-related compassion fatigue with posters that read, “Tsunami, tsunami, tsunami. If you’re tired of it, imagine how our kids feel.”

And the recent tsunami is just one disaster among the many that demand our attention. The tsunami received more media coverage than many of the ongoing tragedies in our world. In January, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair made the comment that a tsunami-sized and largely man-made disaster happens in Africa every week. Overlapping with this is the figure quoted in a recent Time magazine story of eight million people each year—more than 150,000 per week—who die simply “because they are too poor to survive.”

These realities—and many others—are not just a challenge to aid organisations trying to coax further donations from us; they must also challenge us directly. The enemy is compassion fatigue: “Society today has had its heart hardened by progressively hard hitting relief appeal after relief appeal, stemming all the way back to the 1980s when Live Aid brought the shocking truth of the first global African famine to our television screens. Ever since then we as a community have ‘done what we could’ but ‘it is so difficult to get involved’ and ‘doesn’t it all end up being stolen or diluted through corruption anyway?’” (www.counterculture.org.uk/media /billbrys.htm).

Some would argue we need to develop a certain toughness to survive in a world filled with tragedies. The argument would suggest that if we allow our hearts to break at every heartbreaking story, we would soon have little heart left that would be worth breaking.

And, while there might be some truth in such an argument, we also have an inbuilt resistance to embracing a multitude of tragedies. Even at our best, we would probably prefer to be selective in our “charity.” As Philip Yancey puts it, “By instinct I do not want to hear about yet another tragedy, but down deep I know I have no option. I must care about that holocaust of human suffering because God cares” (Rumours of Another World).

When Jesus commanded us to “love each other in the same way that I love you” (John 15:12, NLT), He was not saying this was an easy or convenient thing to do. Indeed, His reference to “the same way that I love you” is a profound challenge, given as it was in the shadow of the cross. And its explicit status as a “command” leaves no room for selectivity or compassion fatigue. Our strength and example is the unfailing and unbounded love of God.

As Tony Campolo urges, “If Christ is a reality in our lives, then our hearts will be broken by the things that break the heart of Jesus. . . . True commitment to the beliefs we espouse will be manifested in compassionate action.”

By the strength and love of God, we must fight compassion fatigue.