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*laughs* I call bullshit. I genuinely believe that Americans are some of the most compassionate people on the planet: as individuals. One glance at the third world will show that American teenagers flock in their thousands to help villages build wells, to help save orangutans in the rainforest, and in their own country manning soup kitchens and running thrift sales for charity.
I think most people, even if they believe in capital punishment, even if they believe very strongly that the perpetrator of terrible crimes deserves to be tortured and killed: if sat in a room with an individual who has done these things, listening to them tell their tale of what took them down that path: whatever their belief in what constitutes justice, would hear that tale with empathy and compassion. It is the human condition. We are wired for empathy. That's why we find psychopaths and sociopaths so damned disturbing and frightening. They are alien to us. They have no empathy and compassion and that is unlike the rest of us.
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