DISQUS

We collectively have learned to see homeless on the street and go about out business without being touched in our hearts. We see real human suffering every day on TV and go on with our own lives without a thought of what we each might do to help. I believe we are desensitized by the availability of "news" but absent of the thought that we can and should take some action to help. We have become the one who crosses to the other side of the street and goes on, taking on action.

I greatly appreciate people like Dr. David Hilfiker who not only are doing what they can, but we are also willing and able to bring hope to us that there IS something we can do. I think the news is presented as so big, so vast, so hopeless that we as individuals turn away, thinking there is nothing I can do. If the government can't, and the corporations can't, and the wealthy can't, then surely I can't.

The reality is that great ideas that really help at least some of the poor, some of the time, are almost always the brain child of one or a few people who are not rich, but willing to roll up their sleeves, raise the funding, and do the work.

Thank you, Dr. Hilfiker and others like you. We need to hear more of these stories.

What a beautiful and "teachable" spirit is the author of this essay. The hardest thing is to change, people around us, even family, do not like the out of balance it gives them for us to change. I commend you for being open and able to see what your own life was trying to teach you.

I am much older, and I have observed that those who refuse to have empathy seem to find themselves living a life of emersion in that which they were unable to understand. If that's what it takes to finally appreciate the path of another and withhold judgement, then so be it. May love continue to light your way like a shining star.

Congratulations. that is a perfect production. He's beautiful.

Get real, John McCain. A few months later you were hugging and fawning over "the nominee" and now you've hired his smear masters to do your dirty work for you. All you want is to win and you don't care how or what you do the country. "Country first" ?? My aunt Fanny.