Democracy requires empathy
Taken at Adelaide’s Make-A-Wish birthday party days before she passed.
Photo credit: Jenny Green Lane
What a week. It is incredibly difficult to see our country this divided over issues that mean life or death to so many. Sure, we can have differing thoughts on the best fiscal and foreign policy - that’s what makes our country strong. It is through the exchange of ideas that we are able to grow. Basic human rights though, should not be up for debate and this has my heart hurting and my mind racing.
I was tuning in and out of the many political pundits filling air time this week when I overheard one of them say that “democracy requires empathy”. I was so struck by this sentiment, its truth and simplicity, and lack thereof in our current political landscape. I did a little googling and realized that this is a concept that has been much studied and written about in political circles and even dates back to our founding fathers.
Regardless of your ethnicity, tax bracket or political party I would hope that we can all agree that empathy is an inherently valuable quality. Maybe we should start with the definition of empathy. According to Merrian-Webster empathy is: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner. With that in mind, when making decisions to best serve our country it would make sense that we employ empathy to understand our fellow citizens and the best interests of our country as a whole.
Being Adelaide’s mother gave me a new perspective on empathy, especially its importance. Empathy allows us to see someone who is different from us not as an other, or wrong, or scary, but simply different. It allows us to acknowledge differences without judgement or pity. No two people are the same or experience life the same and how beautiful that is! How exciting to think how much we can learn from each other.
Empathy requires us to look beyond our own personal experiences to try to understand someone else’s plight. This means that if an issue doesn’t personally effect one person, they still have a responsibility to try to understand the issue and do what they can to help. For example, maybe you haven’t personally felt the effects of COVID but there are hundreds of thousands of Americans that have, so wear a mask, it's that simple. Don’t do it because the government has mandated it, do it because you care about your community because you empathize with high risk individuals, their families and our front line workers.
Maybe you don’t consider yourself racist but you also don’t know many black or brown people and as a result don’t understand why black people wouldn’t have had the same opportunities that you have had. A lack of education does not make another person’s plight invalid it just means that an effort has to be made to understand it. An effort to listen and an effort to learn.
I was absolutely shocked to see the election results this week and perhaps that shows my own ignorance and privilege. Call me a bleeding heart liberal, but I refuse to believe that half of our country doesn’t care about others. That they would put their bank account ahead of millions of their fellow citizen’s lives. But how do you reconcile that with the millions of people that voted for Donald Trump, a man that fans the flames of discord and has a long history of doing only what is best for himself. I want to learn, I want to listen, I want to empathize but this HAS to be a two way street.
The list of actions that brought us to this point is lengthy and well analyzed. That is not to say that there was ever a time when things were better ‘before’. No, the issues still existed we were just better at not rocking the boat but sometimes the boat must be rocked and we are currently in the midst of a full-fledged tempest. Look, I’m no expert, I don’t have the answers, I’m just a special needs mom who understands with every cell of my body how important empathy is to our communal well-being. Short of getting all Kumbaya on everyone, what I have learned is that the strongest path forward is one lit with empathy. It’s not the easiest, shortest, or least painful but it is the most effective… and our democracy depends on it.
