I won’t pile on another boo-hoo essay about how the average American is suffocating under the avalanche of information that gets dumped on him every day. (That would be ironic since my blog would likely be just another pebble that lands with a rattle and a puff of dust near your SOS signal.)

But I will offer a different angle, more like an aha moment than an oh crap moment. It goes like this: the same technology that brings me useless status updates and viral cat footage also exposes me to an enormous amount of human suffering in the world. When both types of information travel the same information highway, it blunts my compassion reflexes over time. 

Does simply knowing about a cause make me noble? If so, then sign me up for sainthood. The ubiquity of lower-case causes is making it worse for upper-case Causes. I grew up during a time when causes were laid out one at a time. It was the era of Jerry Lewis Telethons, Amnesty International concerts, and Live Aid. Everybody knew about them, and everyone’s mercy was highly concentrated. It is different today when our mercy reservoir is taxed by relentless daily information, a constant digital draw on our spiritual compassion.