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Happy Holidays, Y’all

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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 of people talking about the so-called “war on Christmas”, as if the majority of Americans are being persecuted for celebrating their favorite holiday. Look around–Christmas decorations are everywhere. Listen–Christmas songs are being played everywhere. All the time. For a whole month, or more.

How about if we take a step back and think about what it feels like from the perspective of a person who is Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu, or atheist, or any other belief. Let’s listen to Wendy Jacobson, who wrote an article for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune titled “Enough with the Christmas songs.” She was sitting in the bleachers of a public high school, waiting for her daughter’s dance team to perform, days before Thanksgiving, when the p.a. system began playing Christmas songs. And she reached her breaking point. She says, “that was the moment I finally–after 40-plus years of living as a Jew in a Christian world–became annoyed with the constant loop of Christmas songs.”

Of course, we live in a capitalist society, and Christmas sells. It’s a big money-maker. But, it would be one thing if the stores and public places played winter-themed songs (“Let it snow, let it snow”) or even secular Christmas songs (“I’ll be home for Christmas”). When it crosses the line into religion-based songs (hymns) such as “Silent Night”, that’s different. Think of how that would feel to you, if you were of a different faith. For those people who are Christian, let’s reverse things to try to understand the experience from “the other side.” Would you want to be blasted with Muslim songs for the entire month of Ramadan everywhere you went, or with Hanukkah songs for eight days in every store and every public venue you entered? Of course, if that were to actually happen, it might promote the multi-cultural life that actually is America, which we so rarely acknowledge. So maybe Christmas songs, in conjunction with songs from many other traditions and faiths, including Native American and Hmong and Japanese and Somalian and so many others, all blended together over the year, would be fine, and interesting, and enlightening.

But then, there is a reason the founding fathers put the separation of church and state into the Constitution. So while private businesses have a right to play whatever music helps them sell products, public schools should not be playing Christian hymns.

As Wendy says, “I fully understand that Jews are a minority in the U.S., even more so in Minnesota. And I get that Christmas reigns supreme among the holidays. Other occasions are a mere afterthought. But the people who celebrate these other holidays? We shouldn’t be an afterthought. Maybe that’s why I got so frustrated as I sat in those uncomfortable bleachers.”

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Moral Imagination

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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 transcend our own personal experience and embrace the dignity of the human race.”

She talks about how, when she was young, she didn’t feel empathy for an older person with hearing loss, because she “didn’t need to be concerned with it.” She could see it, even joke about it, and then forget about it. Now that she is experiencing her own hearing loss, she understands more of what that person was going through, and regrets making jokes about her. As she says, “It didn’t occur to me that imagining the humanity of people other than myself was my responsibility. And yet, the root cause of so much grief is our failure to do just that.”

Then, Ms. Boylan gets more personal as she shares her experience and viewpoint as a transgender woman. Certainly, transgender people are a very good example of a group which suffers a great deal of persecution, and yet which many people probably figure they can just “not be concerned with.” Unless you know a transgender person, you can read about things like the law in North Carolina mandating that people only use the bathroom for the sex they have listed on their birth certificate and think, “That’s dumb.” And then you don’t have to think about it any more. Or maybe you think the law makes sense, as did the man from the Family Research Council with whom she appeared on TV recently. When he was confronted with the very female Ms. Boylan and asked what bathroom she should use, he could see why it would be weird for her to have to go into the men’s bathroom, but he didn’t want her going into the women’s bathroom, either. Ms. Boylan has a wonderful response to that: “In the end, he didn’t have an answer for the question, because the idea that I am human–and do occasionally need to use the restroom–was really not one that had given him much concern.”

But of course, it should give all of us concern. We should all care about how all people are treated–blacks being stopped by cops, disabled people confronted with stairs they can’t climb, transgender people like Ms. Boylan being forced to use the men’s room…  Our “moral imagination” should inform our thoughts, words, and deeds–our ethics. Ms. Boylan offers a very poignant reminder that our moral code should come from a base of empathy for all of humanity.

Empathy can hurt

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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 your book club chooses to read and discuss a book about a someone’s mother dying of Alzheimer’s disease. I don’t think that I am unusual in often avoiding those heart-breaking movies, or those accounts of mass horror.

But, sometimes it is important, and good, to do so. To avoid these things is to cut yourself off from humanity.

So, a small example: My book club just read a book called Men We Reaped, by Jesmyn Ward. This is one of the saddest, most wrenching books I’ve read in some time. It is a memoir by a young black woman chronicling the tremendous losses she suffered over four years. Her brother, her cousin and three friends died young from various causes, all of which she ultimately chalks up to racism. She grew up in rural Mississippi, poor and disadvantaged, but with strong community bonds. These young men, up against so many obstacles, all died young. Drugs, guns, sure, we readers are familiar with those scourges of the poor and the oppressed. But how does racism cause her friend C.J. to die in a car accident with a train? Well, it’s in a poor, rural black part of Mississippi, where the authorities wouldn’t pay for crossing guards or lights, where a thick fog can roll in from the gulf and totally obscure the train tracks crossing the road. Because they just don’t care. But we do, after reading Ward’s vivid descriptions of each of these young men. We get to know each of them as the beautiful, complex people that they were.

It’s more than she can bear. How could anyone? She shares the overwhelming pain with us, and makes us understand the larger picture. Listen to her: “And in the end, I know little, some small facts: I love Joshua [her brother]. He was here. He lived. Something vast and large took him, took all of my friends: Roger, Demond, C.J., and Ronald. Once, they lived. We tried to outpace the thing that chased us, that said: You are nothing. We drank too much, smoked too much, were abusive to ourselves, to each other. We were bewildered. There is a great darkness bearing down on our lives, and no one acknowledges it.”

This book was so hard to read, and it was so important to do so.

Empathy for animals

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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 that a false question? One that throws us off the real issue.

I think empathy for humans goes hand-in-hand with empathy for animals. If you lack empathy for animals, chances are good you lack empathy for humans as well. I can never forget the worst job I ever had, babysitting one summer for a woman who completely lacked empathy, and was raising a next generation of equally non-compassionate children. The image of the 12-year-old son, who had found a garter snake, putting that snake down in the middle of the street and then riding his bike over it repeatedly until it was dead, is seared in my mind. As is the image of the mother coming home from work, finding food on the ceiling of the dining room, lining up her three children and whipping them repeatedly until one of them confessed.

Empathy for living beings is seamless. Most people have empathy for their pets, and empathy for other humans. The people described in my last post had empathy for a trapped bird, which drew them together in an effort to free it. A lot of good people I know do things like working at the Wildlife Center helping wolves, adopting abused animals into their homes, and swerving on the street to avoid running over turtles. They enjoy seeing animals in the wild, because they feel a connection.

As for myself, empathy for animals has taken a further step in the last few years. Although I became a vegan for health reasons, and for the health of the planet, empathy for animals has become the third leg of the vegan stool for for me. After reading the book, Living the Farm Sanctuary Life, and after seeing various documentaries showing the horrors of factory farming, such as “Food, Inc”, I can’t eat animals anymore. And it doesn’t really make it OK for me if the animals are raised humanely up until the moment they’re killed, although I will grant that this is far, far better than factory farming. As Gene Baur says in his book about his farm sanctuary program, “The more humans understand and respect other creatures on earth–and the earth itself–the more likely we all are to survive. … Our empathy is awakened when we connect with other living beings. That’s part of the magic of Farm Sanctuary. Visitors who have a dog or cat at home are often surprised by how quickly they form an equally strong bond with a cow, pig, duck or chicken. This bonding happens so often that our staff has grown accustomed to dealing with the constant outbursts from visitors: ‘I had no idea that turkeys had such personalities!’ ‘I never knew that sheep could be so sweet!'” Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter, visited Farm Sanctuary with his vegan wife, and afterward said: “It was as if I had flipped a switch. Oh my God, I am eating other earthlings.”

Empathy for other people, empathy for animals. It’s seamless.brown-216001_1920

 

Empathy for a bird

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That’s right, for a bird. One tiny, meaningless little gull provoked a great deal of empathy among a group of strangers walking around a lake the other day, as Gail Rosenblum related the story in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. A gull was hanging from a lamppost, tangled in fishing line, frantically trying to escape. And the gathering crowd of people felt its distress, felt empathy and compassion for this poor little creature, and felt compelled to act. She tells an amazing story of how these strangers worked together, unwilling to just walk away until the bird was freed. The gull was thrashing about, more than 12 feet over their heads. They dragged one trash can over, and a brave boy climbed up but could not reach it. They dragged another trash can over and worked to put it atop the first. A tall man climbed up, pocketknife in hand, as the crowd shouted encouragement. At just the right moment, he was able to slash the line without getting hurt by the thrashing gull, and it took off, free. The people cheered, and then went back to walking around the lake, no doubt with big smiles on their faces.

What does this little story tell us? First, that in general, most human beings are naturally empathetic, not just toward other humans, but toward most living creatures. People did not walk by and leave the bird to struggle and die. They couldn’t. They felt compelled to act, in concert with strangers with whom they now had formed this bond of empathy.

Second, our feelings of empathy are more easily aroused by the one than by the many. We need that personal connection. If we read a story about an oil spill in the ocean, and read about a large group of seagulls getting covered with oil and dying, we feel bad about it–but in the abstract. If we see video of a person carefully scrubbing oil off a seagull’s body, we feel connected, and we feel empathy for that bird.

This is also true for our response to humans in distress. In the same issue of the Star Tribune, a large 5-part series on the disabled in Minnesota began. It included statistics on how many disabled adults work in very low-paying, dead-end jobs at “workshops”, doing things like putting gumballs in plastic sleeves all day for about $5 per hour. Our response to statistics like these is usually something like, “Oh that’s too bad.” And then we move on, and forget it. This series doesn’t let us do that. We meet real people who are living these difficult lives: people like Scott Rhude. We learn about him and his life: “Away from his job, Rhude has built an independent life. He pays his own rent and shares a house with three friends in Willmar, a town of 19,600 west of the Twin Cities. He sings karaoke, goes on double dates and started his own book club. His bedroom is packed with trophies from Special Olympics events. But Rhude’s pursuit of independence ends each morning when the city bus drops him off at West Central Industries, a sheltered workshop on the edge of town. From here, a van takes him to the Kandiyohi County landfill, where he spends the next five hours collecting trash on a hillside as big as two football fields. His job is futile. Prairie winds blow debris from a landfill nearby faster than he and his co-workers can collect it. In the gray sky overhead, a turkey vulture circles in wide loops. Rhude, 33, earns $2 an hour. He longs for more rewarding work — maybe at Best Buy, he says, or a library. But that would require personalized training, a job counselor and other services that aren’t available. ‘He is stuck, stuck, stuck,’ said his mother, Mary Rhude. ‘Every day that he works at the landfill is a day that he goes backward.'”

We can’t so easily walk away mentally when we connect with real individuals, anymore than the walkers around the lake could walk away from that struggling gull.

Roll a Mile in Someone Else’s Shoes

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An article in the Star Tribune by a student named Kate Ross is a reminder that the best way to experience empathy for another person is to actually experience what that person is experiencing. While there are many important and useful ways to increase our empathy–talking to other people, reading about other people, watching films about other people, listening to Ted Talks about other people, meeting and getting to know other people–nothing compares to having the same experience. Many doctors say that they thought they had empathy for what their patients were going through, until they had a serious illness themselves and became a patient. Then their understanding changed and deepened. It became real.

In this case, Kate tells about how she injured both of her legs in an accident and had to use a wheelchair for two months. She says that, like many of us, while she had been sympathetic to people with disabilities, she realized after the accident how far that was from empathy. Then, she experienced for herself how much of a struggle it is for people in wheelchairs to have access to places most of us take for granted. Particularly, she found it difficult to access bathrooms in public places, and to maneuver her wheelchair through crowded restaurants. How many times have any of us sat in a restaurant where the tables are crowded together, and it’s hard enough for those of us who can walk to work our way through the narrow spaces between people sitting at close tables? Although Kate has the use of her legs back, she will assuredly never again use a public bathroom, or move through a crowded public place, or step up easily onto a curb after crossing a street, without thinking about her fellow citizens who happen to be disabled.

And so, she was moved enough by this experience to write an opinion article for a major newspaper, urging us all to truly understand why it is so important for the Americans with Disabilities Act to be enforced.

Of course, it is impossible for anyone to truly experience the life of every other person. But Kate’s story reminds us to be humble–to be careful when we say, “I understand.” We kind of do, but it is important to remember that we also really don’t.

The One-Fourth, Three-Fourths Empathy Symbol

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I’m glad people like the empathy symbol. But to be perfectly honest, perhaps sometimes it should be drawn with the line dividing the two sides, not down the middle, but over to the side. Maybe 1/4, 3/4. Because quite often, while we say that two sides should “reach out and open up to understand each other’s feelings and experiences”, it is true that one of those sides–the majority side–is more well-known to the other than vice versa. Black people already pretty much know what the white experience is, because it’s what they see in the media all the time. Disabled people can see what life is like for able-bodied people, because it’s all around them. Gay people know what it’s like to be straight, because that’s all they see in romantic comedies. Jews know what it’s like to experience everyday life as a Christian–it surrounds them every December for an entire month.

And so, truthfully, it is often mostly incumbent on those in the majority to try to understand the experiences and feelings of those in the minority.

It’s been very interesting, following the Ferguson, MO shooting (and previously, the Trayvon Martin shooting) to see the media cover what it is actually like to be black in America in the 2000’s. The “post-racial” society. Only, clearly, not so much. It’s important to hear this from a general viewpoint, and  from a personal viewpoint.

In the Star Tribune of Sept. 5th, Sara Adams writes from the very personal vantage point of a mother of two sons–one white, one black. How heart-wrenching for her to see her black son stopped at the end of their driveway by the police, and forced to put his key in the door to prove he lived there. How awful to fear for her black son, as she does not have to for her white son, that as he has gotten to be a young man, he will be stopped and harassed, possibly seriously, possible lethally. For good reason. She’s already experienced having her black 17-year-old son detained by the police for curfew violation, while they let his white friends go home. She says, “My white son has never been exposed to this kind of treatment. When he gets in trouble, he is gently reprimanded, reminded that he’s a role model, and told to go home and think about it.” She called her experience raising a black son and a white son “eye-opening.” You should read her story. It will open your eyes.

Jon Stewart described, on a recent Daily Show, how a producer and a correspondent for his show went into a New York City building, the white producer dressed like a “homeless elf”, as he humorously put it, and the black correspondent dressed “resplendently” in a tailored suit. As he said, “Guess who was stopped?” He ended this powerful 9-minute segment on race in America by saying, “You’re tired of hearing about it? Imagine how f**king exhausting it is living it.”

That’s what empathy asks us to do. Imagine life as someone else. Someone of a different culture, a different skin color, a different sexual orientation. Imagine it, and see it as a fully human experience. Just different, in some ways. And of course, similar in many other ways, since we are all human beings, after all.

The media has been very remiss in presenting life in all its variations. Apparently, there will be some new TV shows on ABC this fall about racial minorities. “Black-ish”, a sitcom about an African-American family,  based on the writer’s own family. And it will dare to mention things like racial profiling and Ferguson, because that is actually the reality of the African-American experience. Hopefully, white American audiences will see this not as a black sitcom for black viewers, but as a sitcom about an interesting, truthful and funny portrayal of a black family. Same goes for the comedies that ABC will be putting on this year about a Latino family, and an Asian immigrant family.

So here is my plea: people in the 3/4 group, please acknowledge: empathy and understanding are not always a 50/50 deal.

There but for the grace of fate go I

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Apparently, Scrooge is alive and well these days. He’s not just a relic from Dickens’ time, not just a character in a play we watch during the holidays. Witness these modern-day Scrooges, who say “Bah, humbug” in 21st Century language: Congresspeople who want to cut SNAP benefits, inexplicably wanting to save the government money by literally taking food from poor children’s mouths. Congresspeople who have cut extended unemployment benefits from the latest budget agreement. Outgoing mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, whose policies favored the wealthy and made life much more difficult for the homeless and the poor. Readers of Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column, who responded to his recent writings about food stamp recipients, the uninsured and prison inmates with vitriol and accusations that it was all their fault and they deserved nothing from those who have successfully made their own lives more comfortable and well-functioning.

Perhaps these people who excoriate the poor are afraid that if they feel empathy for those who live in homeless shelters and get their food from food shelves and SNAP vouchers and free meals, they are admitting that these people are like themselves. So they have to set them up as different, as someone they could never be. But in fact, as Kristof says in a recent column, “let’s remember that the difference between
being surrounded by a loving family or being homeless on the street is
determined not just by our own level of virtue or self-discipline, but
also by an inextricable mix of luck, biography, brain chemistry and
genetics. For those who are well-off, it may be easier to castigate the
irresponsibility of the poor than to recognize that success in life is a
reflection not only of enterprise and willpower, but also of random
chance and early upbringing.”
The New York Times had a powerful series just recently on a girl named Dasani, living with her parents and 7 siblings in one room in a particularly decrepit homeless shelter in New York. I defy you to read this series and not feel empathy for Dasani and her family. You will also feel deep admiration for her determination to succeed despite the tremendous odds stacked against her from the moment of her birth.
Which raises the question: What of those who strive as hard as they can, and yet fall behind? Before you write to your Congressperson to urge the government to cut off unemployment benefits to people who have been “living on the government dole for too long”, please read about Yolanda Gray.
And then, turn off the cynicism and turn on the empathy for the down and out, whose ranks have been growing steadily in these times of increasing economic disparity.
We used to say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” I don’t think God had much to do with the fact that some of us live in a nice house and shop at Whole Foods, while other families live in a homeless shelter and shop with food stamps. Let’s just call it fate. As Kristof says, “it’s callous for those born on second or third base to denounce the poor for failing to hit home runs.”

The Age of Empathy?

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My son Zack just shared this article with me. It’s fascinating and thought-provoking, and highly recommended.

It’s called, Six Habits of Highly Empathetic People, by Roman Krznaric. He is a founding faculty member of The School of Life in London and empathy advisor to organizations including Oxfam and the United Nations.

Mr. Krznaric contends that science is pointing us from many directions into an understanding of how human beings are actual hardwired to be empathetic, which makes a lot of sense, given that we are a highly socially-based species. He offers 6 ways that people can increase their empathy. Some are easier than others. Certainly, it’s easier to talk to the person sitting next to us on the bus than it is to go live among people in a slum. But all of the ideas are well-worth exploring, however we can.

Do check out this article, with its accompanying videos.

Chris Kluwe: Punter, Pundit and Empathy Promoter

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Chris Kluwe is the former Minnesota Vikings punter who became famous when he published an enraged response on Deadspin to a Maryland state legislator’s demand to the Baltimore Ravens that they silence their player who had expressed support for same-sex marriage. His well-argued open letter, full of colorful and persuasive language, propelled him into working as a public spokesman for the “Vote No” effort to defeat the anti-same-sex marriage amendment in Minnesota last fall. The amendment was defeated.

For Kluwe, it all comes down to empathy. Plain, simple, basic empathy. As he said on Conan’s talk show, “Societies that don’t practice empathy, if you look at the
historical record, every single civilization has failed. … And really,
the root cause of
that is not being able to put yourself in someone’s shoes. It’s
empathy, it’s treat other people the way you’d like to be treated.” 

Now Kluwe has a new book of essays titled Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies. His subject matter ranges from human rights to philosophy to professional football and more. But he keeps coming back to the basic value of empathy, which is his guiding principle in life. In fact, one of the essays, called “All Your Bases”, asserts that “the core of a stable society is a tripod”, one of the legs of which is empathy: “Without its people possessing a fully developed sense of empathy, a society has no freedom. It is only through accepting the differences of others that a stable polity can develop.” (p.60)

One of the most striking essays in the book is called “Somebody Think of the Children”. (p 116-118) He talks about a Vote No gathering that he attended, and shares some of the thoughts he took away from it. First, he says, “Gay people are exactly the same as straight people. They laughed, they yelled, they congratulated me on the Vikings winning, …they spilled beer on the floor and apologized for doing so. They asked for autographs, …and introduced me to their significant others.”  Kluwe goes on to say, “Gay people are not treated as American citizens. The number of individuals who came up and thanked Brendon and me for talking a stand was staggering and, frankly, depressing. I use the word depressing because if so many have to thank us for showing basic empathy, thank us for recognizing that they are human beings just like everyone else, that means that many, many other people have not. …it means that we are failing the American dream.”

Then he tells about how he was stunned when a teacher/coach came up to him and thanked him, saying “What you did will save children’s lives.” Kluwe says, “This really hit me, in a primal way I was not expecting. … A child should never have to feel that way. A child should never think that suicide is the only option, the only solution to the tormenting and bullying and unthinking viciousness adults often unwittingly pass along to the young. … Because, make no mistake, children who suffer this way are casualties. All the hopes, all the dreams, all the wonderful potential life has in store are as dust before the scouring winds of intolerance (whether it be racist, sexist, or religious.) Every time you propagate the message that a person who is gay is less than human, that same-sex marriage cannot be as filled with love and laughter and tears as heterosexual marriage, that gays don’t deserve to pass a legacy on the to their families, you quicken that howling storm and sweep away a tiny bit more humantity from the world. … Well, I for one will not stand for it. I will not stand for… people thinking that they have the right to live other people’s lives for them, of the complete lack of empathy so often shown in our society. … I stand for equality under the law, for teating others how I would want to be treated. … I stand for my children.”

Powerful stuff. I stand with Chris Kluwe.

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