Where did compassion go to die?

Are our heartless, soulless leaders a reflection of us after all?

It’s been a while since my ramblings brought me here. I’ve been off battling challenges, celebrating wins, mourning losses and growing through it all.

Today, more than 100 people died, burned to death – many beyond recognition – in a tragic fire accompanied by explosions at Kenya Pipeline Company (KPC). With many critically injured, the death toll will rise. It was a needless tragedy, completely preventable – and this fact angered many people. Kenyans on social networks expressed fury at our leaders for three valid reasons:

1. A few years ago, when KPC sought to evict people living around the pipeline (I’m not sure what the regulation distance is), area MPs led demonstrations and told the people to hold their ground and stay put. KPC sought to avert today’s disaster.
2. A few weeks ago, Kenyan parliamentarians cleaned out the country’s disaster preparedness fund to pay their back-taxes following a long standoff with the revenue authority.
3. The same granite-hearted predatory MPs turned up today to ‘show their support’ (I write that phrase with bile rising in my throat) for the community under fire.

These, and many more reasons, infuriate me too. However, they are not the reason I returned to to my long-neglected blog. Another group of angry Kenyans saddened my heart today. This group was angry with the people that went to draw oil from the leak, effectively placing themselves in harm’s way and possibly causing the fire. The heartbreaking and frightening thing about this anger was the subliminal (and frequently overt) message that they deserved what they got and don’t deserve help. They’ve been called ‘idiots’, among many unkinder adjectives.

I’m sure there are myriad views on this, and here is mine.

They shouldn’t have been there, drawing oil. It was a stupid, foolhardy thing to do. They fenced with danger and lost. Do they deserve to die or be maimed for life for their foolishness? I think that’s a pretty harsh sentence to pass on a bunch of hapless people.

See, you, me and the angry people on social networks today wouldn’t dream of doing something so stupid and dangerous.  We wouldn’t even be tempted to slow down near an oil leak, let alone go and draw from it. We also don’t live in the slum on one hundred shillings a day, if we’re lucky. Many of those people are men and women who get up every morning to queue at factories and construction sites in the hope of getting picked for that day’s casual labour roll. Many of them have families – wives, husbands, children, siblings – relying on their luck for a daily living. When they come across an oil leak, they don’t see danger; they see something they can sell or use to ease their burden for that one day. Those ‘idiots’ are driven by need, not greed. It doesn’t make what they did right, but it makes it sadder.

If you can’t find compassion in your heart for the ‘idiots’ driven by their poverty and desperation, then have some for their families – wives, husbands, children, siblings – who right now may not know where their loved ones (and breadwinners) are, or if they will live. Those families need help, not scorn. Do what you can for them. Do what you can to keep their loved ones alive. They cannot help themselves out of this because they are destitute, not because they are idiots.

Compassion (noun): sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with the desire to alleviate it (Merriam-Webster definition)

If your heart still doesn’t yield, consider this: such tragedy does not select the idiots and side-step the innocent. There are people today that died or are fighting for their lives because they were in the wrong place at the worst possible time. Since you can’t tell the difference, then help anyway – and hope you’re helping an innocent rather than an idiot.

If you’re reading this and thinking that coming out to help is doing the government’s job because you pay your taxes and your tax money should be helping the victims – you’re justified. But allow your compassion to be bigger than your indignation.

True – longterm sustainable solutions must be put in place to ensure that such needless tragedy is eliminated by sound and enforced regulation. If there are brilliant lawyers out there who can find constitutional ground to hold leadership accountable for this, then they must do so, and help ensure it never happens again. If there are brilliant journalists, bloggers and microbloggers out there who can dig up the history and put the shaming spotlight on our leaders, then they must do it.

The one thing that we can ALL do is help the victims.

Kenyatta National Hospital needs blood donors. It needs bed linen, towels and clothing for the victims. It needs food. It needs mineral water, because many burn victims die from dehydration. It needs heaters and blankets.

Step out in compassion, help the immediate need and then do everything within your capability and expertise to see that tragedy like this never happens again. Let’s be better than our leaders, and then hold them accountable.

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~ by Mo on September 12, 2011.