Quantifying Pain Is A Painful Business

One of the phrases I find most sickening
is 'I only want to help the most hurting'.
The phrase sickens me whether the pain to be relieved,
or left be, is in animals or in humans.

Who would genuinely grade other people's pain
in order to say mostly to themselves, nobody else,
'Person or animal X or Y is not in enough agony
for me to want to relieve them of their pain.'?

And yet that is what is meant by declarations
of helping the only most hurt must mean.
That is if the idea means anything.....

And if the phrase is practically meaningless
to the person saying it, then that is even worse.

Not On my Watch?

For most of Christian History
the view from faith was 'I believe
that the world will end.
I really want that ending,
complete with all the suffering
which that entails, but....
  ...I don't want to be the agent-
I want it to happen through
my descendants in faith
and the obedient angels'.

Perhaps suffering is inevitable,
and we all know how pain
creates its own consequences.
But it seems to be an egotism
beyond belief to naturalize self  growth
into a pain that diminishes another,
particularly whilst denying the obverse,
zero-sum-logic, of how if we chose
we could live well on less
and reduce the discomfort of others.