A friend shared on Facebook a beautiful story of empathy from one oppressed people for another. The BBC told about how Choctaw people in the southern U.S., in 1847, heard about the Irish people starving in the potato famine. They sent them $170, which would be worth tens of thousands today. As the story related, […]
A recent article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune tells about a brilliant idea that promotes understanding between cultures. And not only that, it’s easy and cheap. Rather than sending teenagers abroad to live with a host family and learn about that culture, it sends them across town for a week. The program is called City Stay. […]
It is very heartening to see the outpouring of support for immigrants, after Donald Trump’s ban on immigration from several Muslim countries. We have also seen, recently, people from other cultures and countries being denigrated, such as Mexicans, Indians, and Jews. The Southern Poverty Law Center indicates that there has been a huge growth in hate […]
I was an empathetic child. I believe almost all children are inherently empathetic, because human beings are tribal, social animals who need to be able to relate to the other members of their group. Some people may have a condition that precludes empathy (apparently, autism may make empathy difficult, for example.) Some people have empathy […]
So, with the election of Donald Trump, people are saying that we can finally say “Merry Christmas” again. Like, we couldn’t before? Of course you can say “Merry Christmas”–to people who actually celebrate the holiday. But it’s not a national holiday that everyone celebrates, like July 4th. It’s a religious holiday. I am so tired […]
My book club just read a stunningly beautiful book: Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson. It is her memoir of her childhood growing up in both rural South Carolina, with her grandparents as well as her mother and siblings, and in New York City. It’s told in free verse, and every poem is highly evocative of her […]
The election for president of the U.S. this year has been more divisive than any I have ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot in my 48 years of voting. I’m not going to say here whom I will vote for. But I will say that as a preschool teacher, while I have used the […]
There is a beautiful article in the Opinion section of the New York Times that never uses the word empathy, but is all about it. Jennifer Finney Boylan talks movingly, and personally, about how we need to bring back Edmund Burke’s concept of “moral imagination”. It is, she says, “the idea that our ethics should […]
Let’s be honest. It’s hard to deliberately subject yourself to pain. Which is what you’re doing if you’re an empathetic person, and you chose to go to a movie about a child who is abducted and murdered; or you read an in-depth article about the victims of a natural disaster or a terrorist attack; or […]
A reader of the last blog post commented that empathy for animals is equally as important as empathy for humans. Is this true? Do animals really “count for” as much as humans? To put it in a version of that classic question, would you rescue a drowning dog before a drowning human? Or perhaps, is […]