Yesterday I received an e-mail asking if I wanted to save the planet, and I was tempted to respond, “no, but thanks for asking.” It implored me to act now or it would be too late. At this point in my life I’m pretty sure I have signed petitions to save everything worth saving, with the exception of jeans under $30 and a decent selection of size 5 shoes. But aside from my annoyance at such an asinine question and the fact that I am skeptical as to whether cyber-petitions have any influence, I was also aware of a numbing effect induced by the nature of e-mail and its fecundity. Staring at the urgent message on my screen, I was reminded of a personality typing system called the Enneagram, in which one of the types is characterized, amongst other things, by having difficulty prioritizing under pressure. For example, when it’s time to leave for the airport, people of this particular bent suddenly decide a houseplant needs re-potting and that the bathroom trash, containing two measly bits of tissue and a Q-tip, cannot wait another minute to be emptied. I can only assume that most of them are single.

I must admit that I am starting to feel the same way in the face of the amount of information I receive demanding my concern, my education and my discernment. I used to belong to an on-line organization that sent a daily list of links to news articles from a wide variety of sources. Then the links started arriving almost hourly, so that I was receiving news alerts throughout the day. A suicide bomb went off in Tel-Aviv; I was notified. The European Union announced plans to lift its arms embargo against China; I got the memo. After awhile, they began to have a counter-effect. Huge portions of the population were suffering, corporations were pillaging left, right and center, our one great American safety net was under attack amidst a barrage of false information, liberties were disappearing and the ozone layer was on its way to resembling an old man’s sock, and I was seized with the desire to clean out my refrigerator.

I don’t sign e-mail petitions where you add your name on the bottom and forward it to everyone who once considered you a friend, but I have participated in ones generated by organizations I trust, where you go to their site, complete a form and are given an opportunity to write something in addition to the form letter. The good thing about these is that sometimes you can choose to have the letter faxed or mailed, which somehow seems better, and they make sure it is sent to the appropriate representative. Still, each time I have done this I have felt like a bit of a fraud. Not literally – I believe in what I am signing and my intentions are honorable. But of all the paths before me to do some good, clicking a few buttons on my keyboard seems pretty paltry, and I suspect the effort involved bears some correlation to its effectiveness. In addition, I have had no connection to a human being – an auto-generated e-mail thanking me completes the humiliation.

Recently I signed up as a monthly donor to Doctors Without Borders, an organization of medical personnel who provide services to those in need anywhere that can be reached by land, sea, air and donkey, or a combination thereof. On the form I completed with my name and credit card information, it asked how I had heard of them, wanting to learn which of their outreach efforts had been effective in my case. Skipping over nearly a dozen boxes to choose from, I checked “other” and wrote a note explaining that I had been lying naked with my cheek on the cold bathroom floor, waiting for the next stomach convulsion to expel a tablespoon of saliva and ginger ale, when I was overcome with shame that I was doing nothing to alleviate human suffering in the world. Feeling more physically ill than I had in years, I knew that millions of people experience misery on a daily basis and I, ordinarily in possession of both wealth and health through no exceptional effort or virtue, was doing little about it.

Shame and guilt have gotten a bad rap in the last twenty years, probably due to excessive use and having been called into service to achieve questionable ends. Modern parents are not supposed to attempt to induce either in their children, however worthy the cause, and to accuse someone of “laying a guilt trip” is to reach, somewhat desperately, for the moral high ground. Yet in their unadulterated meaning, guilt is a feeling of shirked or misused responsibility, and shame is regret for shabby behavior, both inevitable human experiences that hold the potential to nudge us to do better.

I was called to jury duty last month, and sat in a room with thirty other prospective instruments of justice watching Raymond Burr solemnly explain our responsibility as citizens of a democracy. It was hokey and the prehistoric television was so tiny and far away the guy might have actually been Kojak, but that did not make it less true. I had been intending to try and be excused, but I belatedly realized the obvious: very few people find it easy to give up two weeks of their time, and the only relevant question was whether I believed in the right to trial by a jury of one’s peers. I was stuck.

We live in a culture where every means available is employed to manipulate our emotions and dictate what we find beautiful, interesting, disturbing and desirable. This makes it difficult to discover our individual, genuine compassion and appropriate sense of responsibility for the ills of the world. But unless we do, we will continue to reinforce the belief that bombardment, hyperbole and manipulation are necessary in order to gain our attention and persuade us to act.