"Compassion fatigue"
McCarthy, Abigail
Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy "COMPASSION FATIGUE" FACING THE FAMINE, AN ACTRESS LIGHTS THE WAY COMPASSION FATIGUE? Actor Cliff Robertson, winging into Washington to help attract media...
...Those who are cynical about celebrities and their publicized causes might be tempted to jeer at his phrasing if it weren't so clearly true that it was a good, if awkward, attempt to give a name to an ugly fact: the tide of public sympathy rises quickly — and can ebb just as fast...
...Wells can be dug...
...By the time you read this the interest which holds us now in December may have already waned...
...And some of us may feel that the only appropriate response to such overwhelming need would require the dedication of the rest of our lives...
...Liv Ullmann does not concern herself with the long-range solutions beyond affirming her confident belief that mankind has the brains, resources, and scientific knowledge with which to find them...
...New methods of agriculture and food preservation can prevent famine...
...And for our little they extend friendship, and hospitality, and the desire to share with us even when they have nothing...
...We do not really know...
...Trees can be planted...
...That means now...
...They give me so much back," she says of the refugees.' 'They have warmth and personal dignity and such loving families...
...But I keep on doing what I can...
...What stirs our compassion and what will keep it alive...
...He turned off the TV in disgust...
...Some of us find our excuse in blaming the profligate governments whose farm policies brought about the devastation of the rural areas and the rural economy...
...Some of us are outraged by the unjust and vituperative attacks of the Ethiopians in power...
...Do you cry because your family is gone and you have suffered so much?' they asked...
...Every day," she tells the waiting audience, "forty thousand children die — forty thousand between one day and five years old...
...Liv Ullmann is one of these...
...I am an actress, and I must act and earn my living...
...Her strong-boned Norwegian face with the deepset eyes and fresh color is luminous under the unrelieved stage lighting...
...But there are ways to help...
...They teach us what life is...
...Three million children immunized in one day as a result of a gigantic cooperative effort in Colombia — children who might otherwise have died in their first years of life...
...The question preoccupies those who worked to prevent the famine in Ethiopia, and work now to alleviate its effects on the poor drifting people...
...I remember another little boy, one of the boat people, in a refugee camp in Hong Kong...
...There is drought and no water...
...Just what we need on television...
...And now more has been given...
...What moves us to action...
...Sad and unwilling, like the rich young man of the Gospel, we turn elsewhere and do nothing...
...The pitiful hordes of men and women carrying and leading their skeletal children in the almost hopeless search for food and water may already have faded from our collective consciousness...
...Steve Reynolds, a photographer who accompanied a World Vision team to Ethiopia, recalls having seen a documentary on hunger in Africa while he was a college student...
...For such attitudes there is the strong corrective of those who do not question but simply do what they can...
...She has seen victories, some small, some great, in her travels for UNICEF...
...The desert is creeping five miles a year...
...She has just come from Mali which will very soon be like Ethiopia...
...No,' he said, 'I cry because the world is so beautiful.' " She adds, "I do what I do because I came to the stage where I felt I must give something back for what has been given to me...
...Great," he said to himself then, "another famine in Africa...
...She tells us that the crisis in Ethiopia is not new — that thousands of deaths could have been prevented if public concern had been roused earlier...
...And to her audience and to us, "Everyone can do something...
...She visits the camps and the projects...
...A village in India living with renewed hope and health because of a newly dug well...
...It is all too easy to turn away...
...One every second...
...She persists in doing what she herself can do...
...We can only hope that image is bringing food to other children...
...A real answer to world hunger will require long and wearying efforts by many, many people on many levels...
...They saw him watching the lights come on all over the city one night and the tears were rolling down his face...
...The all-seeing television eye will have turned elsewhere...
...She does whatever is possible to publicize the tragic needs and to raise the money needed by workers in the field...
...She suffers neither burn-out nor compassion fatigue...
...For some years now under the auspices of UNICEF she has been carrying the news of hungry children to audiences here and abroad...
...Perhaps what the rest of us have finally responded to is the combination of media attention and the testimony of those people who have also seen and are doing what they can...
...Actor Cliff Robertson, winging into Washington to help attract media attention for the effort to get $1 billion in additional aid for the famine-stricken in Africa, said that he feared it...
...The first film we saw this year was made by the means of her group three years ago...
...She comes alone onto the auditorium stage...
...It takes only the will, and the help of an aroused world community...
...The public, so recently aroused to concern, might succumb to "compassion fatigue" and lose interest in the hungry there before the fight for increased aid could be won...
...You can see it from the plane...
...Her fine-timbred actress's voice falls quietly into the hush...
...But he could not turn off the people he saw...
...And that little boy with the skull-like face and the little shrunken behind like an old man's — that little boy holding his empty bowl with great dignity because he understands that there is not enough food to go around," she says in momentary anguish, "— he is surely dead by now...
...she pauses, ". . . and now . . . and now...
...ABIGAIL MCCARTHY Commonweal: 6...
Vol. 112 • January 1985 • No. 1
