Empathy’s Furnace

Empathy’s Furnace

When I was young I participated in the marches to free Mandela. Once it happened I too saw this great man as something to aspire to. But now, how can you not be affected by the decline of South Africa? The viciously raped and murdered white farmers and their families, and the realisation that no one is marching for them, and on top of that the decaying infrastructure. It seems empathy’s promise of a united and prosperous country is burning.

But in a world that’s aflame, thanks to empathy’s fuel, who has the time to register another faraway fire? Perhaps, in some locked shed somewhere, there is still a pile of posters from that End Apartheid era, where from the ghost behind Mandela’s smiling face despair looks out.

Nowadays many of our weary souls have been deeply singed by empathy’s furnace.

Starving flames we keep alight by devaluing all the gifts we were born with.

The miracle of birth is now a full-term aborted fetus breathing its precious few breaths in a metal bowl on a hospital bench, never to be held, never to be kissed, never to be held up to the moon in appreciation to the gods for granting us such a gift.

It’s the banning of our national flag, while the other country’s flags are worn with defiance.

It’s the destruction of the nuclear family by the same government that is trying to roll out the normalisation of paedophilia over a culture they are eroding.

It is the corruption of science and politics and education and health by the powerful as they try to convince ageing people that the best they can do to help society is pop into a euthanasia clinic and leave.

We once lived in a world where several core truths kept us as safe as a rugged-up child on the edge of sleep listens to their mother singing them a lullaby.

Core truths that are now questions.

And yet still the flames of empathy burn. What will be the final fuel we offer them?

Could it be God?

And if it is, then once God has been consumed, what light will we use to guide us through all the dark that’s coming?

The torch of AI, the cultural bonfire of globalisation, or will we instead, defiantly, follow the great moral-insurgents of our time—those victims who many believe may be able to lead us to a new promised land, great and powerful empathetic warriors like Lindsay Clancy—or will you, once you reach act three of your life, forget all of these important things, as dementia whittles you down to a forgotten old person marooned in a nursing home bed, where you’ll spend your nights calling out to your first love, the love that implanted itself so deeply inside you that no flames could burn it or even singe her light?

I have worked in these places. I have heard you call out with your frightened and failing voices, over and over, in that desperate prayer to love—a prayer that only has one word…

“Mum.”

Michael Gray Griffith