It's about everybody.

   To me, Compassion is about helping a community. Not necessarily the removal of the ego in favour of others, but the expansion of the self to include anyone and everyone alive now and who will be alive. Easy enough to say, but what does that mean to me? Allow me to illustrate.
  I currently go to a school which has the prestigious International Baccalaureate program. Besides housing some of the most intelligent students in the board, it also has some of the most stressed out students in the board. Students fighting to understand complex ideas, studying to remember concepts, staying up at night to finish documents... I would bet large sums of money that few of these students would be able to accomplish what they do without the aid of their classmates. We are all sympathetic to each other. More importantly, we are compassionate, and seek to help others as well as ourselves. This network of help is universally beneficial, as each and every student gets more out of it then they put in.
   Now, what about the rest of the world, those who are not members of our insular group? Well, they benefit too. The symbiotic growth produced by this system creates more intelligent, cooperative, and creative people, precisely the kind of person who can bring about real change in our world.
  Theoretically, this would produce a sort of feedback loop, where a global community is created which constantly improves with each others help; However, this is a very small scale community, one small pixel in the global panorama. To really revolutionize the world, compassionate systems must replace exploitative systems, which only enriches one side of the community. In my opinion, the easiest places to start are our educational institutions.

-Pat.