Missing: Two Valuable Abstract Nouns. Please Search Sheds and Heads for Any Trace.



Photo: Sally Douglas



In my poem 'Winter Children' (the full text of which is below), I wrote about children whose 'abstract nouns have been taken out like teeth'. I was thinking about how, without the ability to talk in abstractions, we are less able to think outside the now, outside the immediate experience of ourselves. In other words, we are made less human. I've been thinking a lot recently about two particular abstract nouns that seem to be missing from many people's vocabulary and actions at the moment. Those nouns are: compassion and empathy.

What has happened to these two fundamental qualities upon which a caring society must be based? I read the news each day and find myself despairing at what's going on around me. Government rhetoric, trying to justify cuts in the benefit system, is demonizing the vulnerable: the sick, the disabled, the lone parents, the mentally ill. With the help of the Daily Mail and similar papers, they are using the language of divisiveness to warp people's perception of each other, by casting people in the role of the 'other'. You're either a worker or a shirker. Never mind the fact that most people on benefits are not playing the system, in fact the larger proportion of people in receipt of benefits are actually in work. They are labelled as shirkers, as idle layabouts sleeping away the day, spongers who are 'doing' the rest of us out of our rightful wealth. The Daily Mail even ran that shameful front page suggesting - no, not suggesting, declaring - that the welfare state causes people to become controlling bullies who are liable to murder their children. 

What message is this sending to our society? To our children? That the haves are somehow more valid, more moral than the have-nots? That we should always think the worst of people? That the needy and vulnerable somehow deserve whatever's coming to them? That if life has kicked someone in the teeth, hey, let's join in the kicking?

And on the other side, we have people gloating and celebrating over the death of an old woman whose power was taken away from her over twenty years ago. Yes, the death of Margaret Thatcher is an occasion to look back and assess the impact she had on this country, on individual people in this country; to condemn or descry by all means, to object to the pomp and expense of her funeral, but to - almost literally - dance on her grave?

I don't care what she did, and how much one might disagree with her, or what damage she did to swathes of society: public gloating and rejoicing does not have a place at her death. It didn't have a place at the deaths of Osama Bin Laden or Hitler either, but at least those people were killed when they were actively doing great harm. Margaret Thatcher had been out of power for over two decades. In the end she was just an old woman with dementia whose family rarely visited.

So what message is this revelry and gloating sending to our the children? To the rest of the world? That we should hate. That we should rejoice in hatred. That we should cherish revenge. That we do not need to have any respect for our own self control when it is in relation to people with whom we disagree, or we feel have wronged us. So, where will we find ourselves next? Having a party because the woman next door who annoyed us a bit has been killed in a car crash?

There are so many ways and means available here and now in the C21st to express one's opinion. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, have all opened up an avenue for individuals to have their say. But, unfortunately, and in part fuelled by the divisive rhetoric coming from Government and the Daily Mail section of the media, whipping up hatred seems to be the mode of the day. And when it becomes acceptable to do this, any target can become fair game to somebody. Foreigners. Women. Gay people. Disabled people. People with mental health problems. Muslims. Christians. Jews. The driver who cut you up at the lights. The woman who always leaves her push chair in the hall.

Other people become dehumanised: they are not 'me', therefore they are less important than 'me'. If we don't exercise the basic human quality of empathy, other people appear less human to us, becoming just ciphers, only as real as the characters in a tv soap. If we don't feel compassion for those less fortunate, we become less than human.

There are two sayings which the government and large swathes of our society would do well to take on board:

Don't judge another person until you have walked a mile in their shoes

and

There but for the grace of God go I.

So please, if you find some stray compassion or some discarded empathy locked away in the shed, starving and shivering, or under a woodpile, or at the back of a drawer, please let it out. It's needed by a lot of people out there. They've lost theirs.

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Winter Children

The winter children
wheel and arc
above the stuttering hinterlands of the city
their faces flattened by the air.

The winter children have faces of damp clay
mean as pinch-pots
features unformed as creeping dunes.

Their words are unfixed guttering.
Their cry like herring gulls on yawling winds,
like fingernails on glass.

What are these winter children
whose skin is damp tissue,
whose eyes are thumbprints,
whose hands are brittle with lime,
fingers red and scaled like feral pigeons’ feet;
whose abstract nouns have been taken out like teeth?

Prised from a pomegranate husk
in the inverted dark
the children of winter now razor the skies
like angels without souls:

clay doves
shedding pieces of themselves upon the rubble,
never closing splintered eyes
even when the dust falls thick as ash.

Sally Douglas

From: Candling the Eggs, Cinnamon Press, 2011.