The program is called City Stay. Minneapolis and St. Paul, like all big cities in the U.S., have a substantial population of immigrants. Specifically, Somali, Hmong and Latin American. This program allows Twin Cities high schoolers to spend a week living with a family from another culture, and it only costs $250 per student. And the student doesn’t have to travel far away. As Julie Knopp, the founder of City Stay, says, “The point is to build relationships across the dividing lines of Twin Cities communities. When a student builds a relationship with a host family, that connection has a ripple.”

What an inspired way to increase empathy between people of different cultures. Both the students and the host families learn about each other, as they prepare food and eat together, play games together, and talk together about their lives and experiences. They learn that they are not so different, just because they may eat some different foods or have different family traditions. And they learn about what their life experiences have been like, including being a refugee in some cases. One family matriarch told her teenage guest about being a refugee from Laos in 1980. “I never heard a story like that,” said the student. And the Hmong grandmother responded, “She see people who look like me, and now she understand.”

The article described the experience of two 14-year-olds who stayed with a Hmong family for a week. “In just a couple of days, Rose and Shaffer visited Hmong markets and tried foods they’d never had, such as spicy noodles and dragonfruit. They learned a few Hmong phrases, such as ‘Let’s eat.’ They also attended a Hmong funeral, watched Hmong bullfighting movies and rap videos, and helped their host family’s young daughter with her math homework.”

Brilliant!

With the sheer volume of hatred and lack of empathy toward large groups of people being spewed in this election (OK, you may be getting a hint of which candidate I am appalled by), I am looking for any sign of understanding toward people with whom someone may disagree politically, as is expected in American politics. Here are two.

In the New York Times on Oct. 20, in the OpEd section, there was an beautiful article by Imbolo Mbue titled “How to Vote as an Immigrant and a Citizen”. She talks about how she is so excited to vote in her first free, democratic election since becoming a citizen, having emigrated from Cameroon. She writes about how, even though every day she encounters anti-immigrant bias, she understands where that is coming from, as countries in Europe as well as the United States and others struggle to absorb the influx of refugees needing so much help. Then she ends her piece with this lovely statement: “Being black, female and an immigrant–and for a good portion of my life, low-income, too–I’ve weathered my share of prejudice. But the empathy Americans have shown me far outweighs the unkindness. That is why, on Election Day, I will be voting for empathy.” How good does that make you feel?

Number 2: In the Minneapolis StarTribune on the same day, in the OpEd Section, was a piece by Faith Ralston entitled, “We can put civility back in discussion.” She talks about how she visited “dear friends” recently, who had polar opposite views on the election. “It was easy to argue,” she says. Then, “I started listening. I started looking for common ground. I began asking, ‘Where do we both agree?’ and ‘What are we both concerned about?'” She offers a number of guidelines on how to respectfully connect with those neighbors/relatives/friends/others with whom we disagree politically. For example, look for areas of shared concern; ask questions, sincerely; make room for differences. As she says, “When regular folks like you and me start talking, showing respect, listening past our differences and finding common ground, we find solutions.” I would add, assume that a person who disagrees with you has reasons for doing so, and try to understand those reasons. Then, ask the person on “the other side” to give you equal respect and try to listen to and understand where you’re coming from.

And yes, I have to say, as an advocate of empathy and understanding, that while individual supporters of any particular candidate deserve our respectful listening and empathy, castigating entire groups of people is not acceptable for any political candidate. This is the opposite of empathy. Let’s hope our country can get back to its core value of welcoming diversity of opinion and people.

The question came up a few years ago, when I was watching the TV show “Parenthood” with my husband. In this particular episode, one of the main characters finds out she has breast cancer. Mike looked over at me, with tears flowing down my face, and asked why I wanted to watch this. In this case, the answer, I believe, is human connection. These characters already felt like real human beings to me, with whom I had made a connection, and so I cared about them.

We recently watched the movie, “Life Itself”, about film critic Roger Ebert. This movie especially focused on his end days, after cancer of the jaw had caused him to lose his ability to speak or eat. It was shocking to see his face with the lower jaw missing. And yet, he remained largely in good humor. I already felt a connection to Roger Ebert from having watched his movie reviews with his compatriot Gene Siskel for so many years. So, as I was shedding a few tears at the end of the movie during scenes of his funeral, I was still glad I had watched it. And Ebert himself said, in this movie, very interesting things about how movies promote, and are often based on, our human capacity for empathy. He said, “For me, the movies are like a machine that generates empathy. The purpose of civilization and growth is to be able to reach out and empathize a little bit with other people. [Movies] help us to identify with the people who are sharing this life with us.”

And indeed, the life that we all share as humans involves both sadness and happiness, both tragedy and great success, both sorrow and joy. If we only read books and saw movies and watched TV shows that were all lightness and happiness, comedy but no tragedy, we would not be making that human connection that we all desire–or at least, not as fully. (Although I know people who only watch comedies, saying that real life involves enough sadness–just watching the news every night gives one a full serving of tragedy–so why chose to watch fictional tragedy? For them, movies and TV are an escape, and I agree, that is a perfectly valid use of media.)

I will admit that I don’t subject myself to certain movies that would be too painful to bear, empathetically speaking. I don’t go to see movies about children who are murdered, for example. And as my children will attest, when I do see movies that are about truly horrible things, I fall apart. They will never forget walking out of the movie “No Country for Old Men” as I was crying uncontrollably. I will never forget driving home from the movie “The Pawnbroker” 35 years ago, sobbing as my poor husband was trying to negotiate driving on icy streets after an ice storm that hit while we were inside the theater. I was just devastated by it, and haven’t been able to make myself watch it again.

So, what do you think? I would love for you to join this conversation and tell me, why do you chose to read books or see movies or TV shows that make you cry?

But, his main point, that it is much harder than we realize to truly understand the lives, experiences, and feelings of others, is true. As he says, if you haven’t been to war, you can’t really know what it’s like–as any returning soldier will tell you. If you haven’t had a child die, you cannot know what it’s like for those bereaved parents. If you haven’t been out of work and searching for a job for a year, you can’t really know what an unemployed person is going through.This is why support groups are so popular and useful. People need to be with others who have had the same experience, as they will tell you.

And indeed, this is necessary for human survival. We are exposed to a lot of difficult and horrible things in the news every day, ranging from those that affect a large number of people, such as natural disasters, to those that affect only a few, such as the story on our local news station the other night about two teenage brothers who were killed in a car crash. I saw the devastated family, the sobbing teammates of the boys, and I could understand to some extent how unalterably horrible this unexpected life-changing event was. But I could turn off the news and go back to making dinner–which I did, because it was too hard to watch that. If we did experience complete empathy for every person we meet, every person we know, and every person we see or read about in the news, it would be overwhelming. It would be incapacitating.

So, perhaps the amount of empathy most of us are able to feel for others is generally OK. We are a highly social species, and empathy helps to maintain those social ties. Humans are far more empathetic than any other species. (Which is not to say that other species, notably dolphins, elephants, and primates, don’t experience empathy. Apparently they do.) We need to try to understand one another, as best we can. We need to read novels and non-fiction, see movies and plays, as a way to learn about others’ lives and experiences. We need to talk to other people, pay attention to others’ lives.

And as Paul Bloom says in this article, “These failures [to be as empathetic as we think we are] should motivate a certain humility when it comes to
dealing with the lives of others. Instead of assuming that we can know
what it is like to be them, we should focus more on listening to what
they have to say.”