Do you empathize with immigrant refugees?
I think I was made for these times. For me, it is not about the left or the right, or the liberal or conservatives, or the progressives versus the alt-right, or the swing left versus the hard right. It’s not about anything the pundits yell and scream about.
The great leaders – Lincoln, Roosevelt, even LBJ, Gandhi, Mandela, Churchill, Christ – all possessed great empathy in varying degrees, and were much loved for it. They all saw their legacy and mission as helping the helpless in difficult times.
Roosevelt, a wealthy man, knew what it meant to be poor and out of work. Perhaps it was his polio. Johnson, born desperately poor, understood what it was like to be black and powerless. Churchill stood with the people as bombs rained down on them, he seemed to know what it was to be afraid. He showed people how to be brave. Christ committed himself to uplifting the poor and challenging the corrupt.
These leaders seemed to know what it is to suffer, they were all known for relieving suffering. For many in my generation, that was the point of government, that and keeping us safe.
I don’t believe the polarization in the country is really just between the left and the right. I think it is between people who feel empathy and people who see empathy differently or don’t feel it much or at all. Or who simply feel it in a different way than I do.
Empathy is a part of my faith and shared experience. It is a defining trait for me, and essential to good writing and creativity.
It is one of the things Maria and I share the most intensely. Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within the other person’s consciousness or frame of reference. It is the capacity to place oneself in another’s position or to put oneself in the shoes of another.
In my lifetime, empathy has gone from being a universally admired trait to a politicized symptom, a casualty in the polarization wars. Empathy is now, fairly or not, associated with what is called the “left.” The right has largely discarded it as an outdated conceit of the morally bankrupt elite.
The question of empathy hovers all over the refugee controversy wracking the country, another trauma.
I imagine empathy has a great deal to do with personal experience. I was born Jewish, and am close to the immigrant experience, so I feel deeply the fear and trauma of the refugee, the dislocation, terror, loss of wordly goods, the horror of separation, the terror of a strange new home, cut off from all that is familiar.
Other people in Washington, people I hoped would raise their voices on behalf of these helpless refugees, were silent or said this suffering was a small price to pay for us to feel safer in a turbulent world. Maybe they are right. I hope not.
I saw the other day from watching as much news as I could bear that many people share my feeling, and many people don’t. I never thought of empathy as a political issue, or as a political choice, but it now is, I see, yet another casualty of the left-right thing. No feeling or issue can stand on its own any longer, free of labeling.
I see that many people, even the descendants of immigrants, do not share this identification. They wave off the furor over immigration as just another liberal/media concoction, a political stance to oppose or dismiss. It is just about security, it is not a big deal, it is just temporary, it will protect us and make us safer. If we all make enough money, everyone will be fine. We don’t need so many immigrants, a change is long overdue.
It is said that Donald Trump and many of his supporters lack empathy. When Sen. Charles Schumer held a press conference and teared up about the immigration ban on the steps of the Supreme Court, the President tweeted that “I noticed Chuck Schumer yesterday with fake tears, I’m going to ask him who his acting coach is.” I know nothing much about Sen. Schumer but it never occurred to me to doubt his tears, they were brief and mild.
A number of people were struck by President Trump’ response to Schumer, whose lost a number of family members during World War II. How would any of us know if the tears were real, why would it matter? “Trump is so lacking in empathy,” wrote a commentator on Vox, “that he can’t even begin to comprehend the possibility that another person might experience it.”
Why couldn’t Schumer simply be wrong, why did he have to be false and insincere? It seemed to me that our President was assuming Schumer would obviously do what he might have done. It seemed that the President could not empathize with Schumer and still disagree with him. Schumer had to be less than human, something other than moral.
Many political leaders and ordinary citizens could simply not grasp that it might terrifying to the people in families suddenly separated by the ban to think they may never be able to see their loved ones again, even if that turns out not to be true. They did not see it the way I did. They could not empathize.
The dismissal of human suffering feels to me to be at the heart of the polarization ripping the country apart. An auto worker, asked by a reporters what he thought about the immigration action, said brusquely, “who cares what a bunch of terrorists think?” The lack of any empathy was painful to see.
Empathy and the lack of empathy have become political positions, not emotions or individual concerns. One side claims empathy, the other side scoffs at it as a myopic and expensive indulgence.
It is possible, I suppose, that one side of the country has taken empathy too far, being overly sensitive to too many different things, indifferent the growing social and literal costs. No free person can really love political correctness.
I empathize with the refugee immigrants struggling to get to America, perhaps because I was born Jewish and come from a family of immigrants. Empathizers are losing political power and position, they are getting drubbed in one election cycle after another. Is empathy, like compromise, lost?
This weekend, and after my requests for help in aiding some new refugees here, I saw empathy on the march again, perhaps it is making a comeback. Perhaps it never really went away.
I find the people I am closest to are empathetic, and practice empathy. For me, empathy is the cornerstone of faith. I don’t really care if someone lives on the left or right, the people and leaders I am drawn to intuitively relate to the suffering of others. They would not ridicule a man who cried while arguing his beliefs.
Christ is often said to have cried during his sermons on behalf of the poor and the suffering. The priests in the temple said he was a fraud.
In Luke 6:20 Jesus says “blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you shall laugh.” Why, I wonder would this ethos from one of the greatest leaders in the world not apply to persecuted and dispossessed women and children, yearning to be safe and free? Why is that a false and exaggerated and outdated impulse?
Christ was perhaps the first great historical figure who built his life and movement on empathy. Today, many millions of people denounce empathy in his name and turn away from it.
I don’t believe that my empathy is the only true empathy. But empathy is important to me, and when it dies, something precious and irreplaceable goes with it. The poor and the helpless suffer even more, it becomes acceptable, even admirable, to turn away from them.
I am so grateful to the hundreds of people from all over the country who put aside their fears and prejudices and have reached out to the suffering refugees who made it to my area before the doors were slammed shut on their families. They were not content to put dubious security and political issues and rationalizations ahead of suffering. They are able to stand in their shoes, empathy rises above political argument.
People either have it or don’t.
My strategy: Don’t argue. Do good. My argument is not on Facebook, it is my life. If you empathize with the refugees, help them here, it is simple and inexpensive, It feels good.