Sympathy for the President

For quite some time, I've been trying to write about Empathy or Compassion (I understand both things to be tied to each other), but I have consistently failed to say anything particularly intelligent about the subject.

Today however, I saw this photograph, and the subject just forced itself back to my attention.

(Photo is courtesy of AlMasry-AlYoum website)


Here is this sick man sitting in a hospital listening to his doctors, and he happens to be the Egyptian President.
To some he may be a national leader, to others he may be a cold-blooded tyrant, but in all cases there is the undeniable fact that he is also a sick, old man in a hospital.

The photo can't conceal the fact that the hospital looks like everything our hospitals in Egypt aren't, and neither can it conceal the fact that the president looks very well taken care of, but it also can't conceal the fact that the man looks old, sick and weak.

And to many people (or to me, at least) this photo is infinitely sad.

It may natural I suppose, because the idea that even this man, who has been ruling a country for 29 years and counting; the idea that he is NOT above the human condition, NOT immune to the frailness of old age (as his PR staff would like us to think), and NOT beyond sickness and death; that idea is quite sad.

And despite this idea being well known to us all as a basic fact, that photo still manages to strike me, and I cannot help but feel an overwhelming pity for that man dressed in pajamas and a robe, thousands of miles away from home, listening to doctors talking in a foreign language about his "condition".

I really cannot help but identify with him, and all my feelings towards what he's done or didn't do -although still upheld and maintained- kind of take a collective step aside, and let sympathy go through.

And quite miraculously, I find myself thinking: May God's love be with you, always.

(On another rather unrelated note, I am hereby denying my awareness of any pun related to a Rolling Stones song title that may be inferred from the title of this post!)