On Empathy

I can't help it.

When I see somebody crying, I cry. When I see someone in pain, I feel pain.

It's who I am. It's all I know.

It seems though that I am the exception rather than the rule.

We have an empathy deficit in our country. We are cold. We are suspicious. We are unfeeling. Our hearts are hard. Our souls are empty.

On April 15, once again our country was the subject of a terrorist attack. It was carried out not by a well organized cell of foreign terrorists, but by two bumbling young brothers whose motives are still unknown.

Already there are calls to take action both domestically and internationally. This isolated and incredibly stupid attack is being used as justification for everything from increasing domestic surveillance, to attacking immigrants, to going to war yet again.

The FBI is swooping in to charge or pressure everyone who ever knew the brothers. The younger brother has been arrested and his friends charged as accessories after the fact. The older brother's widow is being followed and surveilled 24 hours a day. In possibly the most disturbing occurrence, she can't even find anywhere to bury her husband, as if somehow by denying his body a resting place, we can undo the damage he had wrought through his bombs.

What the hell is wrong with us? Is this what we have become as a nation?

Just a quick perusal of the news headlines or my twitter feed shows that what happened in Boston on April 15 is an every day occurrence across much of the world. In most cases the suffering inflicted on these civilians in other countries is either directly or indirectly the result of the policies and actions of the United States.

I point this out not to excuse the actions of the Tsarnaevs or to cast blame on the US for what happened in Boston. I point it out simply to say that this is an opportunity for us to understand, just a little bit, what many people around the world suffer every day. That maybe, just maybe, we could form a connection with those civilians across the planet who live with the threat of bombs, with the reality of lost limbs, maimed bodies, dead children on a daily basis.

I recall in a discussion on race while in law school following the verdict in the OJ Simpson murder trial, saying that this was an opportunity for white folks who were outraged at the verdict and were feeling rage and disbelief many felt at that time, to understand just a little bit what African Americans felt after the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King. That if we could understand that, perhaps we could move beyond the divisions that continue to separate us.

That didn't go so well. But, I'll try it again.

As we go forward from this point, we need to remember what the last 12 years have brought us. In our understandable rage following the September 11 attacks, we gave up our privacy, our security, and many of our rights. We have been at war for 12 years. We have destroyed our economy. We have turned much of the world, who was with us in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, against us. We have tortured, we have assassinated, we have droned. We have turned against many of our most cherished values in the name of safety and the prevention of "terror."

We have tried everything except understanding.

We still have a chance. We can increase our empathy. We can see those things that we share with those "others" that we see as our enemies. We can make a small effort to feel the pain that these "others" feel and recognize it as our pain too. We can see that the mourning that is felt by the parent of an Arab child killed in a drone attack is the same mourning of the parent of a child killed in Newtown. We can see that the shame felt by a devout Muslim seeing her religion slandered by a suicide bombing is the same shame felt by a devout Christian seeing her religion slandered by a zealot holding a sign that says "God Hates Fags." We can see that the fear felt by a villager in Yemen afraid every day of having their village bombed in the same fear we have of being attacked by another unknown terrorist.

We've tried everything else. Look where it has brought us.