If my daily life seems poor I don’t blame it, I blame myself. I tell myself that I am not deep or creative enough to call forth its riches. To the creator, wrote a young poet, there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.

This is the great gift of empathy. It forces us out of our narrow and fearful selves, and into the river of humanity, of which we all swim.

“We obviously disagree on politics,” one person wrote me recently, “but I love your photos.” I appreciated the good words, but I also shook my head. This person, like most people, have no idea what my politics are.  She never asked me and I never told her. The narrative of the left and the right has taught many people to fit everyone into one hole or another, to pull out their labels, and they always assume they know which one to stick on.

The left and right teaches us how not to think or feel. Both cultures hate empathy, because they need to hate one another. The practice of empathy would kill them off for good, and then, they might actually have to think.

My politics are not those of the left and the right, my politics are the politics of empathy, which is very different from sympathy. When people tell me my politics make them uncomfortable, I know they have little idea what my politics are, they never ask, and they cannot see beyond their own self-affixed labels. Yet there is no label that fits me, there is no  political party in power in our country that shares or reflects my own personal values.

There is a wonderful piece on a website called brainpickings. It ran a piece on the birth of empathy, it got me started on this path early this morning. Empathy seems a meaningless phrase in our time, it is my faith.

“Empathy,” wrote Maria Popova on her website, is an orientation of the spirit.

It is celebrated as the hallmark of a noble spirit, a pillar of social justice, the gateway to reaching our highest human potential. It is, to me, the centerpiece of our very humanity. It is also failing, struggle to live in a culture dominated by fear, anger, self-interest and money.

In our society, we no longer ask people what they believe, we tell them what they believe, and then hate then for what they  believe. Most people no longer care what other people believe. To do that, you must empathize.

This idea of empathy is a little more than a century old. It entered the popular cultural dialogue in the early twentieth century, when it was used to describe the creative act of projecting oneself into a work of literature or art in an effort to understand why the art or words moved or touched us.

In his famous book You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainier Maria Rillke and Auguste Rodin, Corbett explores the birth of empathy: “The moment a viewer recognizes a painting as beautiful, it transforms from an object into a work of art. The act of looking then, becomes a creative process, and the viewer becomes the artist.’

The viewer stands in the shoes of the artist, and sees the world from his point of view. Same with a writer and reader. When a follower of Maria sees something of themselves in one of her quilts or fiesty pothoiders, they have empathisized with one another. Each becomes the other, at least fleetingly, each is in the other’s shoes.

To me, this is what my political struggle is all about, the collapse of empathy and compassion as political ideals.

The idea of the human – the politician, the immigrant, the refugee, the political opponent, the poor and the sick, the individual – have been subsumed by ideology and dogma. We hate everyone in need, blame them for their suffering, deny them hope and comfort. To me, our political leadership consists mostly of Anti-Christs, they celebrate a system that rejects sympathy, and then empathy, in all of its form.

We hate the other, the individual struggles to life in a world overcome by Corporatism, where individuals are anathema, pushed to the very edges of life.  The Corporate Nation insists that life becomes ever more complex and expensive, that is how they grow and feed their rapacious stockholders.

You will never see an individual or original thinker on one on cable news or getting a million-dollar book contract or talking in the Senate.  No one is permitted to go too far outside the box. The individual is a genuine refugee, even in his or her own nation, struggling to survive in an Orwellian world.

Sympathy is the perception, understanding and reaction to the distress or need of another life form. This empathic concern is driven by a switch in viewpoint, from a personal perspective to the perspective of another group or individual who is in need.

Empathy is not about pity, or even need It is about feeling,  the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within another frame of reference. It is the capacity to place oneself in another’s position. “Empathy,” says Wickipedia,” is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another and feeling with the heart of another.”

It is precisely what is missing from our political and public life. Empathy  is the true killer of hatred. Empathy would be the death of polarization and logjam, it is also essential to creativity. If the writer or artist is to connect with others, he or she must empathize.  That is the moment of creation. The connection between viewer and readers.

The moment a readers recognizes a piece of writing as relevant and true to them, then the readers  becomes the writer. They have each empathized with one another.

The story of modern politics to me is the death of empathy, and thus, a rejection of sympathy. The poor are lazy and corrupt, they take advantage. The immigrant is not someone seeing a better life, for which we once had sympathy, but a parasite, come to steal our jobs and services. The refugee is not a noble and deserving aspirant yearning to be free, but a terrorist come to kill and rob us.

Globalization is not a miraculous coming together of a fragmented world, but the loss of income and prosperity. Open borders will not unite the world and bring connection, but endanger the world and steal our identity. Isolation seems safer.

For me, empathy represents the best in us. But now, it is the worst of us that our political system speaks to and embraces. Lots of good work to do, I am nothing but hopeful.

Empathy is the essence of our love for people, and especially for animals. Since they can’t speak, they ask us to put ourselves in their minds and consciousness, and so that is what we do. It seems harder for us to do this for people.

One of the students in my class evoked the image of Nazi Germany and the rise of Hitler yesterday, and I rejected that comparison. As  a Jew whose family suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazi’s, I do not believe the historical comparison to be valid or proportionate. I’m not there, I said.

I can testify that it is easy to blame a Jew for being blind and short-sighted, there are many voices in and out of one’s head shouting beware, beware, it can happen here. I do not believe it is happening here or that it can happen here. That is my faith in my country. Sometimes, fear is a greater danger than hatred. Faith is sometimes stronger than both.

We are in exciting times, they challenge us to make good and hard decisions about who we are, and I am committed to the search for and understanding of empathy. I do not care to shut fear and uncertainty from my life, or equate that with peacefulness.  What we are going through is not tragedy or ruin, but life.

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you?,” wrote Rainer Maria Rilke, in Letters To A Poet

“Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.”

All I can do is work to get better, and I am and I will. For me, empathy is the noblest human aspiration, the path to my highest human potential, my greatest challenge as a writer and an artist