A good friend  asked me the other night why I was going into Albany several times a week to work with the refugees in need, and I didn’t have the  will to explain it to her at that moment, but I have been thinking about it.

I thought about all day today after I met with Lisa, a new refugee from Afghanistan, carried here on a tidal wave of grief and trauma after her husband was murdered for working for our country, upending every part of her life.

I have not really said before how powerful an experience it is to me to meet these very remarkable men and women. They have every reason to give up on humanity, but never do.

Like so many other people in our culture and country and world right now, I think I have become dehumanized over the years, first as a journalist seeing too much death and violence, then as a corporate executive asked to lay off as many as 60 people in a single day, and then again, as another victim of  cable and digital technology.

Like so many others, I have been made numb and insensate by the sheer volume of violence and depravity and rage and argument flashed into my psyche every time I turn on a phone or tablet or computer. I am forgetting how to feel, I sometimes lose an ability to empathize, the greatest moral aspiration of human beings..

I am struggling to feel, it sometimes feel as if the world is sucking it right out of me, if we felt for all of the cruel things we see and hear,  we would perish under the weight of it.

I want to be human again, and stay human. To be de-humanized is an awful thing, it means to deprive ourselves of human qualities or attributes, of empathy and compassion, to  divest ourselves of individuality and follow the mob.

If the you into the eyes of Lisa above, an innocent victim of the worst of humanity, you see a pain that is blinding, and a soul fighting to live. Those eyes reflect much too much sadness  for a 27-year-old.

I can’t know what the future may bring for her, I see the deepest pools of sorrow. I hope I can help her. I need to do that, for me, as much as for her. Perhaps the light will one day return to her eyes, the spark of life.

There is a lot of stake, if I wish to remain human.

Sometimes this de-humanization has been thrust upon me, sometimes I go foolishly seeking it out. As any soap opera viewer can testify, violence and misery is perhaps our greatest addiction, and there has never been more of it to look at for free. Pope Francis is still human, you can see it in his eyes. He preaches to a deafened world. I admire his faith. He never gives up on being human.

I think the refugees and the Mansion residents are bringing me  back, perhaps some of you as well.

They are helping me to feel again, to enjoy the bounty and rewards of doing good.

It is not an argument for me, it is horrifyingly simple:  there are people who feel the horror of children torn away from their parents and imprisoned for months and months, and there people who do not find it horrible or painful in any way. Aren’ t they criminals? Aren’t they breaking the law? Won’t they steal our jobs and rape our women?

Why is it, one might ask, that during all of the hundreds of years of immigration into American, it was never considered moral or appropriate to separate immigrants from their children as they attempted to enter our country. It was simply too inhumane and cruel to be even considered.

Today, thousands of refugee children are locked away in new and giant prisons, separated from their parents for months, even years and much of the country thinks its not only appropriate but long over due. We can’t have these dirty hordes overrunning us, can we? I cannot imagine the country of my immigrant grandparents slamming shut the door to all of the  refugees of the world at a time when there have never been so many of them in such great need.

But the problem is the refugees  are part of our national souls, we can’t destroy them without destroying something of ourselves. They are us.

When I was a police reporter, I saw so many dead bodies from car accidents and rape and murder and accidents that my best friend, a police Sergeant named Bill Ten Brink, took me aside one night and said it was time to do something else. Why, I asked? Because you’re getting to used to it.

He was right. I had stopped feeling, it was just work to me. Later, he was gunned down and killed during a traffic stop.  When he was found, his dog was in the car, tearing at the door.  I had no  trouble weeping then.

For the past decade or so, I’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands, of videos images of bombings, roadside bombings, car bombings, suicide bombings, mass murders, shootings, and the slaughter of children in our schools. It seems we have stopped being shocked by these images, they are just another part of the background noise we live with every day.

Horror is no longer  horrible, it is just routine. Even the once unthinkable horrors – the gunning down of children in schools – fades from memory quickly, just another thing for the left and the right to fight over. After Sandy Hook, more than 400 children have been shot in school shootings.

Horror has become a familiar ritual for us, we just close our eyes and wait for it to blow away like a dark cloud, to make room for the next horror.

Today, sitting at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Albany, one of these images, one of these horrors became very real to me, as happens so often now when I got to meet a   refugee who needs help.

The sad eyes of Lisa, whose beloved husband Abdul was blown apart by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan, penetrated my consciousness, shattered the screen all of us put up to fend off the feelings that well up and haunt us.

This was not a news alert, or an argument on cable  TV, or another video of tragedy on my smart phone or YouTube. There is was, right off of the screen, right out of the news, looking right at me through those sad eyes that were so often filled with tears.

It was a powerful experience – it is a powerful experience – to be sitting a few feet away from this woman whose life was blown to pieces along with the man she loved and  had two children with. Since then, she has lost everything she loved and knew and had.

Every friend, every penny, every possession, the very understanding of her life and future. And then she got to America, where she lost everything she had left, everything once again. She seems in shock to me, trying to cope with what has happened to her and her life, surrounded by a vast system of bureaucrats who  just don’t seem to care.

Like me, the young reporter, they have seen too much of it, they had stopped feeling.

How many roadside or market bombings have I seen on a screen, it is hard to even focus on one any longer?

The images all blur into one another. Once again,  I have been dehumanized, and again, I am fighting back against it. I look into these eyes and see great pain and sorrow starting back at me, awakening me, reminding me of what it means to be a human and feel like one.

Every time I meet with one of the refugees in need, I  become more human. I can feel more, empathize more, become a little more human.

The only explanation I can think of to explain all of the cruelty and anger and disconnection I feel around me is to believe we have been dehumanized,  both by demagogues and technology. The demagogue, the parasite of human suffering,  does not create the rage and cruelty, he just lives off of it, it is his fuel.

All those images, all those arguments have numbed us to empathy and compassion. We have become selfish and greedy, detached from pain and sorrow, cruel and unfeeling.

In my journeys into the refugee world, I feel things again, I admit it is both wrenching and wonderful. It is good to be alive. Suffering is no longer a distant abstract to me, these screen images are coming to life,  sitting right across from the table, and asking me what it is I wish to be in my life, what it is I wish to do. They call upon me to ask  who I am.

The people I meet in Albany and try, with Ali, to help are very beautiful to me. They inspire me.

They have known defeat, great suffering, struggle, unbearable loss and refuse to sink into the depths. They have an appreciation, a sensitivity and an understanding of life that  fills them with compassion, gentleness and a deep loving concern for others.

Instead of giving advice or judgement, I am opened up, drawn to share our pain and touch our wounds with an open heart an a warm and tender hand.

I sometimes think that all I ever wanted in life was to reach out and touch another being, not only with my hands, but with my heart. That is what I felt today listening and talking to this still numb and wounded woman, groping in the dark tunnel to try to put her life back together again, for her husband’s memory and the sake of her children.

Every time she looked into my eyes, I felt the shell cracking, the light getting in. I hope we can help her.