I just read Daniel Chan's blog about his "good Samaritan" story, it kinda raised a lot of questions for me about the nature of our compassion...

I am not at all surprise to hear about his story, I mean, even in the 80~90s when I grew up (in HK), it has always been like that. Does it mean Hong Kong people are really apathetic? But when you look back on the charity events in recent years, like the sichuan earthquake  donation drive and other similar events, Hong Kong people have always been praised as the most generous donors and for shows like "tung wah" charity night", the amount of donation breaks record every year... so it is quite ambivalent to accuse HK people  of lacking conscience while we're almost never late to offer help when necessary.

So it seems clear and safe to say that HK people are never short of sympathy for the poor. So instead of directing the concern to conscience or compassion, what else should be blamed?

Is it because people are just too BUSY to care? I mean, you are busy, I am busy, everyone is busy, but is it a good excuse? When people say they are too busy to care about this or that, I always want to ask them, are you busier than the president or premier of a country? For instance, how come even the US President can take a break once in a while or bring his kids to relax a bit, but you can't even spare a minute to care about your love ones, or even simply make a call or return an email when they really need you? Ask yourself this question: do you remember how many times you forget your love ones' birthday? How many times you miss a gathering with them? How many times you forget (intentionally or not) to call back or write back a friend/family members? And for all of these, your primary reason is  because of your so called busy schedule  (or the truth is, it's simply out of ignorance)? No, I don't mean to make this a lecture, in fact I also make the same mistake once in a while... what I really want is for people who always use "busy" as an excuse to ignore people around them to think...

We are not lack of conscience, we are not lack of compassion, then what do we really lack? Actually I don't know. There might be millions of reasons. While I believe technology does actually alienate people more than bringing us closer (think about how much you value an email than an actual written letter you received in the past and the tendency of you responding to an email, and for your reference, the probability of me getting an email response is 10:1, that means, I usually only get 1 email response for 10 emails I send, and these are not emails I send to strangers, most are friends, good friends), which interestingly is against its original purpose,  there probably should be more than that. What is it? you tell me...

Going back to the original question, one interesting yet sarcastic point to make is that, we tend to help people far and far away, we'd give our money to them, show our compassion to them, even though these are people we haven't met before, but when someone is right in front of us, we just leave no sympathy and choose to ignore him/her... So in some senses, it means the closer someone is to us, the more we tend to ignore him/her... and trust me, this makes regret. people just regret when it is too late to show their love to those they care (just like the song 愛得太遲).. and it is sad but true to see that even though we know it, we still tend to repeat this mistake over and over again.

If we can't even love those near us, can we still call ourselves compassionate??

(sorry for the lack of structure of the writing, it's just quick and disorganized thoughts)