"love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice"

(To Be Read While Listening to Greenday's "21 Guns.")

No matter how petty her or his reason seems to us, telling a distraught person to "suck it up" is as damaging as showing pitiful sympathy; it also contains an edge of anger and annoyance that someone is putting ugliness in front of us, or a memory of being in similar distress and receiving similar reprimand. The alternative, comforting the other, is always appropriate in all sufferings, small or great, imagined or real. "Comfort" includes a Late Latin source, confortare meaning "to strengthen greatly"; comfort is empathy with empowerment.