A Compassion Vote
Where the coin drops, when it's a single person before an image.
This informal poll was totally unscientific, and thank goodness for that. Otherwise the implications would be dark.
This image is of a small alcove in St. John’s Hospital, one of Europe’s oldest preserved hospital buildings. An area is given over to several excellent paintings by Renaissance master Hans Memling. The hospital also holds many relics and provides information gained from centuries of caring for the sick, one of the truly great functions of the Church.
Learn just a little about the treatment of bad teeth or kidney stones, and you become very grateful to be alive today, whatever the political noise.
This area invites a meditation on caring and compassion. The visitor receives a token, and is asked to look at seven images, each of which evokes a human mood. From left, above, there is a lonely-seeming figure, an old couple, a boat apparently full of migrants, a puppy in a basket, peaceful Nature, an empty hospital bed, and two children on a beach towards sunset.
The visitor is asked to put their token where they feel their affiliation. You have to zoom in to see it in this picture, but when I visited the puppies garnered the most coins, along with a forest and children. Migrants and loneliness came last.
I was shocked, not least because people were willing to (semi) publicly state their affiliation with a pet over a boat full of humans.
The most charitable view I can take is that people see dogs as unsullied by our human complications. They bring joy,companionship and optimism. Voting for the dog was in that sense voting for the picture that brings that connection.
The migrants, in this framing, represent difficulty and sadness. They have complex stories of exploitation and loss, of lack. They bring complexity and need. The optimism, if there is any, is earned after struggle.
Even so - a puppy over people in a boat at sea?
No wonder a dog’s mouth is said to be cleaner than a human’s - dogs can’t tell you about the things they’ve seen.