An Absence of Empathy

Empathy is defined as: the ability to understand and share the feelings of others.

What's so disturbing about the current public debate is that there seems to be a complete inability to demonstrate true empathy. Instead we have tortured, circuitous narratives to show that "your story" is really "my story." We're meant to recognize that the life experience of Hillary Clinton, a 60 year old, upper middle class (now rich) white woman from Illinois, is somehow intimately tied to that of 60 year black children of share croppers from Alabama. The dehumanizing mantra is, "We are all the same." But, we are NOT the same. To assert otherwise, not only annihilates the power of our individual experiences, but it diminishes to nothing the moral significance of helping others. It says, I care about this issue, because your issues are my issues, and ultimately, to help you is to help myself. But, this is not empathy. In fact, these sorts of political gestures seem to cynically reject the very possibility of empathy in American public life. Maybe rightly so. Empathy is caring about what happens to your neighbor, or someone on the other side of the world, not because their fate is your fate, in some literal-minded way, but because you recognize that person's humanity, and you relate to them on that basis alone. Because what happens when we CAN'T make those acrobatic, a-butterfly-bats-its-wings-in-the-Amazon connections? What happens when the people we need to reach out to are truly and utterly different from us in terms of their cultural, political, and religious experiences? Jim Crow happens. Abu Ghraib happens. Darfur happens. And, yes, September 11 happens.