Sympathy & Cringing

We all experience the cringe moments.  Personal cringes are bad enough, but those of others can be downright painful.  Their common TV fodder, some people enjoy watching these moments of shame and anguish.  Some of us have developed over-active senses of sympathy and can't bear to watch what we know is about to happen.

Lucy and Charlie Brown are perfect examples.  We know at some point Lucy is going to get him to kick that football.  Just like when we see people on television or even in real life traipse ever closer to the precipice of a cringe-worthy act.   You want to warn them, but you know they won't/can't listen.  The best you can do is hide your face, like a kid hiding from the monsters under a blanket. Then it happens...

Lucy pulls the football away, for the 1,000th time.  Part of you wants to say shame on you Lucy for taking advantage of that ludicrously stupid Charlie Brown yet again,.  I mean, doesn't it get old?  Guess not, the gag keeps running.  But in the end, it's Charlie Brown who's responsible.  He should know better by now.  Still, he keeps kicking at that football on his quixotic quest and we keep on cringing.

After all is said & done, were left where we've been so many times before, cringing, sympathetic & annoyed.  There is only so many times we can see this before it is intolerable.  We have to accept the fact that some people in this word are just masochists and others like to take advantage of the situation.

These moments of cringe-worthiness are hard to handle on television, but are far more intolerable in real life.  Like a friend that waits to study for the test until the last minute & wonders why he failed.  The parent who never disciplined their child or told it "no", and now has a rampaging brat of a teenager.  But even worse is what happened in and is now still happening post the shooting in Arizona.

The shooting was tragic, beyond the cringe, but demanding sympathy.  The fallout is what will be the cringe-worthy event to start 2011 off with the proverbial sword rattling.  Already people are blaming this or that party, that thought on guns, the congresswoman's politics or a dozen other things.  What matters here is that people were hurt and now instead of showing sympathy and compassion, some people want to throw salt on the wounds, like the politicos & Fred Phelps.

Sometimes cringes turn to tragedies.  Sometimes there is no learning curve to avoid to disaster. So people really are just vultures waiting for others pain.  Now I can get a kick out of schadenfreude with the best of them.  But actions like Fred Phelp's plan to protest these peoples' funeral was just sadistic and evil.

The best thing about this situation with Mr. Phelps, is even though he has the right to spew his hate, we have the right not to listen and just walk away.   We can focus instead on compassion & kindness.