Litigious world can't fathom compassion

People just don't understand. How can Mindy Carter-Shaw embrace the man who blew up her son Bridger and sentenced him to a lifetime of surgeries and misery? How can she whisper comfort and forgiveness in his ear? How can she plead with authorities to keep him out of jail?

Lawyers have called and called and called, fresh on the scent of another ambulance to chase. They want to represent her. They want to sue. They want to go for millions, ca-ching! Revenge makes the world go round. Ours is a litigious society. We can't even sled on the school playground anymore, we're so afraid of lawyers. Half of all TV shows wrap themselves around the theme of revenge.

Mindy won't have it. She's 29 years old and has little money (her husband is a college student). She relies on Medicaid to cover the medical bills. Maybe the cynic in you believes that she is offering forgiveness only because she needs the culprit out of jail so he can pay her bills. Then why, in the hours immediately after Bridger was maimed and it appeared he would die, did she urge and ultimately convince the police not to put him in jail? There was nothing to gain at the time.

You'll have to suspend your cynicism, at least for the next few paragraphs.

She learned compassion the hard way. As a child, she was a geek, a nerd, whatever you want to call it. Her family was poor. She lived in a trailer park for years. She wore the same clothes to school nearly every day. She ate her lunch alone. The popular kids kicked her in the back of the legs as she walked down the hallway at school.

They slammed her locker shut in her face. They teased her.

"We have a compassion and empathy rule in our house," she says. "You can break any other rule, but if you break the compassion and empathy rule, you're in your room for a long time."

If empathy wasn't already part of his soul, Bridger, who's 12, learned it from his mother. He literally gave kids the shirt off his back. One of his classmates each year is a boy whose clothes were ill fitting and worn. Over the years, Bridger has given him shirts, pants, shoes and a skateboard.

"Did I tell you the story about the $300?" Mindy asks.

Each morning Mindy takes a break from her bedside vigil by leaving Bridger's hospital room at 7 a.m. She always returns an hour later, but on this occasion she was gone two hours. Bridger wanted to know where she had been. She explained that she had been delayed in another part of the hospital after meeting a mother whose daughter had fallen out of a two-story window. This woman had rushed to the hospital from out of town without money. She hadn't eaten for a day.

"I want to give her my money," Bridger told his mother. He was referring to $300 he had recently received from various relatives as a birthday present. "Are you sure?" Mindy asked him. After arranging to have the money brought to his room, they presented it to the mother.

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