When people hear that word, they think someone trying to provide water to people, or to heal or comfort the sick and dislocated.
In my case, though, I think structurally: what IDEAS are floating around that are CAUSING mass suffering? I look not just to objective poverty and deprivation, but to CULTURAL poverty and deprivation.
Are the Tibetans suffering more from poverty, or from the sustained Chinese assault on everything they value and love? They were poor before, and I suspect most of them would go back in a HEARTBEAT to the status quo before the Chinese came, even though that would mean many of them living in cold places in yurts (or whatever they call them.)
What are the pervasive American maladies? I would say sanctimonious indifference to preventable suffering in our midst, materialism fed by a lack of a good alternative, and a complete abandonment of sensitivity to spiritual crisis and growth. We want to be clocks. We aspire to be gears in vast machines. Some gears are bigger and shinier, but qualitatively the same.
This is my principle enemy. This is the principal problem we face. We have good tools for economic development: property rights, free markets, and political freedom. These have always worked and always will work. Why are they not generalized the world over? Bad ideas. Horrible ideas, and, again, a sanctimonious indifference to outcome, which is to say preventable human suffering. It took both the Chinese and the Indians over half a century of mass starvation to adopt free markets, and they have advanced more in 20 years than the previous 1,000.
I am a Humanitarian. This is why I get pissed so often. I hate stupidity, and hate it even more when it works to inflict pain on innocents. As some meme I saw put it, keep in mind that one option for those who aspire to be Christlike is pulling out a bullwhip and running the bastards out of town.