empathy

Empathy in 1847

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Choctaw sculpture

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, “The Choctaw people empathised with Ireland’s famine victims. Just 16 years before, the American government had forcibly removed them from their land, moving them to designated parts of south-east Oklahoma.

In what became known as the Trail of Tears, thousands of people walked more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km), having been forced to leave without gathering their possessions. Four thousand people died of hunger, cold and disease.

Historian Julie Allen told the BBC World Service’s Newsday programme: ‘We had been through so much, losing so many of our people thorough death because of the weather, starvation and disease that 16 years later we heard about the Famine and the horrible situation that they were going through, we felt such empathy that we wanted to help.'”

Can you imagine? But then again, it is known that poor people are more generous with charitable contributions than rich people, in terms of percentage of their income. Walking a mile, or 1,000 miles, in the tattered shoes of another, has to increase one’s empathy for them. And yet, the Choctaw could have been bitter, could have turned their backs on the Irish. After all, it was white Europeans who came to their shores who were their oppressors. But they did not.

We must admire their empathetic generosity, their grace and spirit. And indeed, Cork-based sculptor Alex Pentek was so taken with this beautiful act that he has created a 6-meter high sculpture of feathers, honoring the Choctaw. As he said,  “While I was trying to put myself in the shoes of the people suffering I realised that some things are just unimaginable, that the level and scale of suffering that both nations had endured was really beyond being able to think about, beyond our grasp.”

And so, 170 years later, Choctaws went to Ireland to celebrate the dedication of this sculpture, and the empathetic act that had forged this bond so long ago.

Cross-cultural empathy here and now

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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. 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!

Outpouring of Support for Immigrants

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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 groups recently. But, in a positive way, we can focus on the tremendous push back that we are seeing by the majority of people in the United States against all this hate and misunderstanding.

When I was at a high school in St. Paul recently for a tournament, I saw signs all over the school for “hijab day”. All girls were invited to wear a hijab in support of the Muslim students at their school. The signs said that they could go to a certain room where they would be given a hijab and get help learning how to put it on. I imagine girls of all colors and creeds coming together in that room, laughing together, talking together, and offering support and friendship. Empathy, growing stronger because of this very concrete and beautiful action.

As we see hate crimes growing against Jews again, we also see Muslims and Christians and atheists offering help and support to Jews whose cemeteries were vandalized, who endured bomb threats and worse. At our local Minneapolis JCC, when a bomb threat was called in and they had to evacuate small children from a swimming pool, shivering in the cold winter air, a nearby business quickly took all the children in.

People are saying, no, this cannot stand. Rather, we stand with those who are targeted as different. They are not so different after all. They have families, communities of faith, jobs, friends. People from Pakistan, Somalia, India, Syria share our humanity. They also have cultural differences. Let us learn. Let us respect each others’ differences, as well as our common humanity. Let us have empathy.

The sign pictured, “ALL ARE WELCOME HERE”, grew directly out of the election and the feeling that, suddenly, and in a very un-American way, all are not welcome here anymore. I see this sign everywhere I go–in people’s yards, at the high school I was visiting, at a large shopping mall in the central court (endorsed by the city of Edina). Please check out the website, learn more about why all should be welcome here, and expand your empathy. Also check out their Facebook page. This month, they’re posting about wonderful women is support of Women’s History Month.

Let us say it firmly: ALL ARE WELCOME HERE.

How I developed empathy as a child

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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 snuffed out because of horrendous abusive childhoods. I just finished reading In Cold Blood, the classic tale of a true, vicious homicide of a family in Kansas in 1959, written by Truman Capote. That killer had had an abusive childhood in many ways, and never had any remorse for what he did. He was a sociopath, and he just couldn’t feel anything for anyone except himself.

But most people are, to varying degrees, caring and empathetic persons. (At least to people in their own group, if not so much to outsiders who do not share their religion, culture, and so on… but that’s another issue.)

One way that my empathy was developed was through TV. I recently heard a reference to the old TV reality show, “Queen for a Day”, and that reminded me that my mother had to finally forbid me to watch it, because I found it too devastating. On the show, three contestants shared their sad stories–for example, about how they had no money and their husbands were out of work, and their washing machine and dryer had broken down and they were washing everything in the bathtub and hanging the laundry all over the tiny apartment which they and their five children lived in; or maybe it was a handicapped child, and they had no money for a wheelchair and so had to carry him everywhere, but the woman’s back was giving out… Each contestant had a heart-breaking story to tell. The audience voted via an applause meter for one winner–who would be considered the most sad of all? Music played, and the winner was draped in a red velvet robe and crowned. She got her needs met, and got other wonderful prizes as well. The other two contestants got small prizes, but did not get their problems solved. At the end of each show, I was sobbing. All of their stories were so hard, they all deserved to have their needs met, and it was so unfair. Which it was. That was a really cruel reality show.

I have a distinct memory of another time, when we had a babysitter, and we were watching the TV show “Bonanza.” On the show, a lovely and sympathetic female character got trampled to death under the hooves of a spooked horse. Again, I was sobbing: out of control, can’t-stop-heaving sobs. I remember the poor babysitter was so distraught–she didn’t know what to do. (Yes, I was also feeling empathy for what the babysitter was feeling, but I still couldn’t stop crying.)

Anyway, media in general is a good way to expose our children to other people, other viewpoints, other cultures, and other circumstances of life. TV, movies, and books. I read a lot of books as a child. The one I could never forget (although I can’t remember the title anymore, unfortunately) was about a girl who wore a Star of David (which I had never heard of) on a necklace, and how she faced prejudice. That one had a big impact on me.

Of course, my parents own demonstration of empathy toward others, both in small, everyday ways, and in larger ways, was very important. My dad was the chaplain of an organization called “Indoor Sports,” for handicapped people. Every year our church put on a big picnic to which most church members, and many members of Indoor Sports, came. Seeing and interacting with people such as the man who had such profound cerebral palsy that he was very difficult to understand when he talked was eye- and heart-opening.

Finally, my parents treated all of us children with profound empathy. True confession here: one time, I used that to my advantage. I was riding my trike in the driveway and the garage, and jumped off it and let it sail forward. It ran right into a stack of storm windows, breaking some of them. Oh oh. I deliberately worked up a good set of tears, and then went inside to tell my father. He was so sympathetic to how I felt that instead of getting angry at me, he comforted me, and I didn’t get in trouble at all. Dad, if you’re reading this, sorry for playing on your own deep sense of empathy. But thanks for helping me to become an empathetic person.

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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Poetry to enhance your empathy and connection

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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 feelings and experiences. Although it’s called a book for young adults, we 60-something women all found it deeply moving.

Let me just share part of one poem to give you a taste of it, called “stevie and me.” Ms. Woodson describes what it was like to discover in the library a book with an African-American child as the main character, which just wasn’t done much in those days. (John Steptoe wrote it in 1969.)

“Every Monday, my mother takes us

to the library around the corner. We are allowed

to take out seven books each. On those days,

no one complains that all I want are picture books.

Those days, no one tells me to read faster

to read harder books

to read like Dell.

No one is there to say, Not that book,

when I stop in front of the small paperback

with a brown boy on the cover.

Stevie. …

If someone had taken

that book out of my hand

said, You’re too old for this

maybe

I’d never have believed

that someone who looked like me

could be in the pages of the book

that someone who looked like me

had a story.”

Her poems are not just about growing up black in the ’60’s and ’70’s in the south and the north. They are about her individual experience with her extended family and her friends and school and learning that she was driven to be a writer, and so much more. Here is the ending to her poem about talking to grandfather, “Daddy Gunnar”, on the phone when they are in Brooklyn and they miss him so much.

“How are my New York grandbabies, he wants to know.

We’re good, I say, holding tight to the phone

but my sister is already grabbing for it,

Hope and even Roman, all of us

hungry for the sound of his faraway voice.

Y’all know how much I love you?

Infinity and back again, I say

the way I’ve said a million times.

And then, Daddy says to me, Go on and add

a little bit more to that.”

As the book jacket says, “Poignant and powerful, each poem in Brown Girl Dreaming is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world.” I highly recommend this book.

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 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.

Are People Actually Bad at Empathy?

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The New York Times published an article by a psychologist named Paul Bloom, titled “Imagining the Lives of Others.” In it, he reports on a new book by psychologist Nicholas Epley called “Mindwise”, which says that humans are actually much worse at empathy than we think we are. Like several of the commenters on the column, I am skeptical that the studies cited really prove that. Those studies “included asking speed daters to identify others who wanted to date them, asking job candidates how impressed their interviewers were with them and asking a range of people whether or not someone was lying to them.” The fact that the subjects were pretty bad at doing these tasks doesn’t tell me that people can’t be empathetic.

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.”

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