Compassion or Oversensitivity?
The Sick Child Edvard Munch (1863-1944) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] ... We have lost sight of the wisdom that a bit of suffering, stress and criticism is part of the human condition and doesn't require intervention by the police, the state or anything else beyond our own inner resilience... A decade ago a psychologist called Nick Haslam noticed a curious shift in the meaning of words. Trauma, for example, was once applied to physical injury (like blunt force trauma), but usage gradually extended to encompass being belittled verbally, or merely hearing about the trauma suffered by others. Over time, an ever wider and milder range of experiences were coded as traumatic. The same was for bullying. Once used to denote a big kid hitting a little kid in the playground, its meaning was extended to verbal aggression in the workplace, and then minor interactions in which harm was not even perceived by the putative victim. In a way, you might think, so what? Many words change the...