...Barbara Lazear Ascher in “On Compassion” believes that compassion is something that we learned and develop, not something that is embedded in our DNA. Compassion is a trait that we are born with. After all, would compassion even exist if one did not have it in the first place? In order for humans to survive, we had to naturally have compassion in order to survive on our own and as a race. When a human is born, their innocence to the world makes them naturally have an instinct of compassion and to help others. When can haul this behavior is hate. Hate is something that is learned overtime. A child has no hate in his or her’s heart until taught to by their environment. They are taught not to talk to a certain someone, or they are bad, or “I don’t...
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...“On Compassion” by Barbara Lazear Ascher focuses on where compassion comes from. While Ascher ultimately believes that people are not necessarily born with compassion but rather it is learned through experience, she also brings up the point that it is ultimately hard to tell what drives people to be compassionate and to what extant. I feel like Ascher focuses a lot on pathos in her essay. She paints a vivid picture of the message she is trying to tell about compassion and really attracts the reader by exposing them to the scenes and therefore willed into feeling compassion themselves. In Maya Angelou’s essay “Graduation” she writes about her graduation day and how proud she is of her academic achievements, only to have a guest speaker knock...
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...Is compassion real? In the passage “On Compassion”, Barbara Lazear Ascher recalls a couple of brief encounters with homeless people in New York City. And after she shares her story about the homeless people with the audience, then she informs her view on compassion. She explains how people help others just to feel better about themselves. She asks the audience, where is the real compassion? Author states that people with empathy can show real compassion, because empathy comes when people really understand and can share the feelings of another person. Ascher continues with her contention by giving examples on how people can misinterpret sympathy by empathy. According to Ascher in some situations people tend to help others just to satisfy...
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