Wednesday, October 13, 2010

It's easier to love the whole world than one person

Celebrating the Chilean miners' escape from beneath the earth, I started to speculate on the celebrations world wide. Of course we were all happy for them and their families and friends. Universal joy...... but what if...??? What (hypothetically) if we knew them personally and we knew things about them which meant we didn't like them much..... what if we knew one abused their family? or one was a bully? or one was a thief? and the like... It seems to me that it is much easier to love the whole world - at a distance - than to love someone we know well.

1 comment:

  1. It works the opposite way too - it's easy to generalise when you don't know people personally, eg with racism, but harder when you actually know some people from that group.

    ReplyDelete