I have no idea why the guy brought it to me, other than to remove it from his sphere of responsibility, but it felt like a test. Here, I present you with suffering, what will you now do?

The squirrel lay in a blue recycling bin, ontop of some gravel and a piece of tarp. It’s body no longer worked the way it always had, and whenever it tried to heave itself into an upright position, it could not. Imagine the effort– the desperate and complete effort– it must have taken to do that, again and again and again. The eyes of the animal were terrified and dull, and it seemed obvious that it was dying.

I placed the recycling bin in a shaded place, and then brought out some water and nuts, hoping that over the course of the night it might somehow recover, or die as nature had ordained.

I woke up the next day to see that the animal had lifted itself from the box, travelled perhaps 25 feet, and collapsed on the street. It rose to 40 degrees that day. The situation had become worse, and I could see that my actions had been a feckless half measure, designed to make me feel better more than actually help the squirrel. If I had more courage, I would have killed the squirrel. Or I would have picked him up with my hands, wrapped him in a blanket and carried him into the cool of the apartment. I would have done more than the bare minimum necessary to excuse myself of moral repsonsibility.

It’s funny, when we’re on social media we appear so responsive to suffering, so brave. We stand in solidarity. We sign petitions. We boycott and shame. We make bold proclamations, as if calling troops forth to battle, our virtue and sensitivity shining like fires. But in the real world? When we’re actually called to suffering?

Well, I didn’t do much. My efforts were just enough to make me feel better, you know? I got the squirrel onto the grass, tried to shield it from the sun, and once again set out nuts and water.

As I sat at my desk I could see the squirrel through the window as it lay immobile, occasionaly spasming as it tried to right itself. Other squirrels were arriving, not to help, of course, but to take the nuts I had laid out. It was unbearable to watch, and so I called Animal Services.

They arrived, plucked the squirrel up off the ground with an elongated grabber, swiftly put it into a cage, thanked me for my, I don’t know, participation, and then left. And that was that. The animal’s suffering, the animal’s death, was no longer my responsibility.

Whatever the test was that I was given in the form of this injured squirrel, I am sure I failed. And I cannot help but think of myself online, up to my neck in this absracted reality where we’re all so certain we know what the good is, and how to accomplish it. But when I was literally handed a small opportunity to alleviate another creature’s suffering, my intercession was insufficient, and the unintended consequences of my actions had made matters worse.

I will try to remember this as I move through my days.

What stunned my class most about the book was the casual attitude the characters had toward slavery. I mean, how could they not know that slavery was an evil? Nothing could have been more clear to us, nothing. Slavery was pretty much the most evil thing we could think of, and it was mind-blowing to imagine that this wasn’t vividly reflected in the experience of our ancestors.

And so we figured that people back then must have been hateful and stupid monsters, willfully acting in their own best interests at the cost of others. And so we judged everybody in the book, imagining ourselves morally superior to the louts, trolls and insane people who populated the past.

But this didn’t make any sense.

There was absolutely no reason for me to think I had a more finely developed sense of morality than anybody who came before me. There must have been some decent people who participated in slavery and had no idea that what they were doing was wrong, no? They were simply living in the world into which they were born, and to them slavery, like the weather or landscape, was an unexamined fact of life rather than a conscious act of moral will.

This seemed clear to me. I was not unique. I was like everybody else, and that, of course, is a very scary thing to admit to oneself.

Technology has accelerated and amplified our culture in ways that are inconceivable.  Every year it seems that the world has changed more than in all the previous millennia stacked before it. It’s dislocating, and I often think of technology, in particular our online lives, as an emergent dimension we don’t yet understand or know how to interact with. Whenever we’re uncomfortable or bored with our physical lives, however briefly, a smart phone serves as a magic wand we can wave to take us to this other realm, and put in that context, none of us should be surprised to find discontent, even anger there.

Our desire for social justice has far outstripped our ability to deliver it, and in many ways I see ideological conflicts as dimensional clashes rather than moral ones. By the standards of today, so much of what we as a society did just ten years ago seems appalling, but as we judge it’s worth remembering that ten years ago we had no idea what we were doing was wrong or unfair. We were just operating within the framework of time and place. So how then to police this if every generation, indeed, every person, is going to be witlessly complicit in ghastly acts ?

Of course, revolution is not about justice, it’s about change.

And as the future and the past battle for supremacy in a ruined present, it seems that the only way it can end, the only way it has always ended, is like in a Shakespearean tragedy—everybody on stage dies, and then, the world purified and laid bare, is seized by those, now done with watching, who had been waiting in the wings.

Her legs had been amputated just above the knees and parts of her fingers were missing, too. The area where her fingers stumped were swollen, red and bleeding, and smears of blood were all over her sweatpants, jacket and the two bags of cat food she was looking to buy. He hair was a dangerous nest of possibility and her eyes were angry and lost. She was talking, in a fractured but not incoherent kind of way, but it wasn’t clear to whom, and as she was doing this she was cutting the line. The security guard, moving in an I-hate-my-job way, was coming over to stop her, while the cashier, with a look of horror on her face, recoiled.

I did not know what I should do. The suffering and need of this woman could not be more vivid. I wanted to be Jesus, I wanted to selflessly love and help her, but I did not.

I stood there paralyzed, thinking about the blood-streaked bags of cat food on her lap and how they were going to get from there to the cash. I did not want to be a part of that process and so I decided to buy the cat food for her. This cost $4. I did this out of self-interest rather than altruism. The cashier and everybody in line seemed relieved.

Then one of the bags fell from her lap to the floor– as if a bell tolling, a command to be more involved in her suffering than I was willing to be. Again, I just stood there, waiting for somebody else to become alive to this moment, and then I saw something in her hands that looked a lipstick container and it struck me that perhaps this was all a performance and she had smeared lipstick on herself in order to look like blood and garner sympathy! It was an act!

It was an astonishing cognitive leap, this. There are homeless, broken people all over Toronto, and in order to inure ourselves to this procession of misery, we have to believe there’s a level of performance to the suffering. We construct ridiculous narratives that keep us distant from those asking for our help. Maybe it was all just a ruse, but no, no. This woman needed to buy cat food– either to eat or to feed to the one point of light in her life–and there was blood all over it and it was lying on the floor two feet from where I stood.

For what felt like a minute but was probably closer to 20 seconds, nobody did a thing, and then a woman bent down and with a gloved hand picked up the bag of cat food and returned it to the woman’s lap, the security guard then rolled the panhandler out, and the rest of us continued with our day as if nothing had happened.