“The sensitivity of men to small matters, and their indifference to great ones, indicates a strange inversion,” the French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher said.
Camille Anna Paglia has the same view. “A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt from women, and it is confirmed only by other men. Manhood coerced into sensitivity is no manhood at all,” said the American author, teacher, and social critic.
Film performers are perhaps the most sensitive persons. Take the case of Jessica Chastain. In 2011, Chastain gained wide public recognition for her starring roles in seven film releases. Last year, “Time” magazine featured her as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” Her tour de force performances in “Zero Dark Thirty” and in the 2013 horror film “Mama” led film critic Richard Roeper to describe her as “one of the finest actors of her generation.”
“I’m very sensitive in real life,” the two-time Oscar nominee admitted. “I cannot not cry if someone around me is crying. I will start to cry if someone is crying, even if it’s not appropriate. I have that thing in me, a weakness or sensitivity.”
Two-time Oscar winner Robert De Niro believes in that, too, when it comes to acting – but with a little help from the director. “Good directors can bring certain things out of you, with their intensity or gentleness or sensitivity or understanding,” said the actor who topbilled in “Raging Bull” and “Cape Fear.” “They can make an actor feel he can do no wrong.”
American musician and film director Fred Durst echoed the same thing on sensitivity. “
I love it when talented actors can bring characters to life,” he pointed out. “Anybody who wears their feelings on their sleeve and has a harder, crusty shell – like I do – is definitely protecting an inner sensitivity.”
More often than not, we are sensitive to our needs but not with others. We tend to focus on our values instead of others. In some instances, things are more valuable than our fellow beings.
Here’s a sensitive story I read from a blog. While a man was polishing his new car, his five-year-old son picked up stone and scratched lines on the side of the car. In anger, the man took the child’s hand and hit it many times not realizing he was using a wrench.
At the hospital, the child lost all his fingers due to multiple fractures. When the child saw his father with painful eyes he asked, “Dad when will my fingers grow back?”
The man was so hurt and speechless; he went back to his car and kicked it a lot of times. Devastated by his own actions, sitting in front of that car he looked at the scratches; the child had written: “I LOVE YOU DAD.”
“How do we know that Moses was grown up?” Julius Gordon once asked. “Because he went out unto his brethren, and was ready to bear the burdens and share the plight of his people. Maturity is sensitivity to human suffering.”
Remember the parable of the Good Samaritan as told by Jesus and is mentioned in only one of the gospels of the New Testament. According to the Gospel of Luke (10:29-37) a traveller (likely a Jewish) is beaten, robbed, and left half dead along the road of Jericho.
First a priest and then a Levite come by, but both avoid the man. Finally, a Samaritan comes by. Samaritans and Jews generally despised each other, but the Samaritan helped the injured man.
In the time of Jesus, the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was notorious for its danger and difficulty, and was known as the “Way of Blood” because “of the blood which is often shed there by robbers.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., in his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, on the day before his death, described the road as follows:
“I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road I said to my wife, ‘I can see why Jesus used this as the setting for his parable.’ It’s a winding, meandering road. It’s really conducive for ambushing. You start out in Jerusalem, which is about twelve hundred miles, or rather, twelve hundred feet above sea level. And by the time you get down to Jericho fifteen or twenty minutes later, you’re about twenty-two feet below sea level. That’s a dangerous road.
“In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the ‘Bloody Pass.’ And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. Or it’s possible that they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking, and he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt in order to seize them over there, lure them there for quick and easy seizure. And so the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’”
However, King continues: “But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’”
“It is only through such real-life daily struggles and challenges that a genuine sensitivity to human rights can be inculcated,” said Daisaku Ikeda, an educator and Buddhist philosopher. “This is a truth that is not limited to school education: it applies to all of us.”
