Relief and Prevention in Society
Since suffering is such a universal motivating experience, people, when asked, can relate their activities to its relief and prevention. Farmers, for instance, may claim that they prevent famine, artists may say that they take our minds off our worries, and teachers may hold that they hand down tools for coping with life hazards. In certain aspects of collective life, however, suffering is more readily an explicit concern by itself. Such aspects may include public health, human rights, humanitarian aid, disaster relief, philanthropy, economic aid, social services, insurance, and animal welfare. To these can be added the aspects of security and safety, which relate to precautionary measures taken by individuals or families, to interventions by the military, the police, the firefighters, and to notions or fields like social security, environmental security, and human security.
Read more about this topic: Suffering
Famous quotes containing the words relief, prevention and/or society:
“[W]ith them we’ll beat little Van, Van, Van is a used up man.”
—State of Indiana, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“... if this world were anything near what it should be there would be no more need of a Book Week than there would be a of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.”
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)
“They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be.... What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them.... There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)