"The World's One Hope" - By Bertolt Brecht

"Is oppression as old as the moss around ponds?
The moss around ponds is not avoidable.
Perhaps everything I see is natural, and I am sick and want to remove what cannot be removed?
I have read songs of the Egyptians, of their men who built the pyramids.
They complained of their loads and asked when oppression would cease.
That's four thousand years ago.
Oppression, it would seem, is like the moss and unavoidable.

When a child is about to be run down by a car one pulls it on to the pavement.
Not the kindly man does that, to whom they put up monuments. Anyone pulls the child away from the car.
But here many have been run down, and many pass by and do nothing of the sort.
Is that because it's so many who are suffering? Should one not help them all the more because they are many?
One helps them less.
Even the kindly walk past and after that are as kindly as ever they were before walking past.

The more there are suffering, then, the more natural their sufferings appear.
Who wants to prevent the fishes in the sea from getting wet?
And the suffering themselves share this callousness towards themselves and are lacking in kindness towards themselves.
It is terrible that human beings so easily put up with existing conditions, not only with the sufferings of strangers but also with their own.
All those who have thought about the bad state of things refuse to appeal to the compassion of one group of people for another.
But the compassion of the oppressed for the oppressed is indispensable.
It is the world's one hope."

In the midst of your suffering today, to whom can you extend compassion?