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Barbara Lazear Ascher's On Compassion

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Full-time writer Barbara Lazear Ascher’s 1988 essay “On Compassion” conveys her perspective about interactions between people of different social classes to reveal her opinion on the reasons for compassion and where compassion should come from. Ascher’s purpose is to have her audience question the ways that compassion can be shown and to challenge society’s fear of “raw humanity”(11). She adopts a warm but clinical tone in order to prompt her audience, the literate and the intellectually curious, to question the motives behind compassion. Ascher begins her essay by invoking the primal fear of when anyone or anything unfamiliar approaches. She juxtaposes a man in a “buttonless shirt” (1) to a woman shopping on “Madison Avenue” (1). Ascher highlights

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