After NYPD raided Zuccotti Park on March 17 2012, about 100 people were arrested. Among them a young girl seemed to be suffering a seizure and panic attack as she was being brought to the bus. It takes 17 minutes until professional help arrives after a protester standing outside the barricades makes 911 call to get EMT to come .
The struggle to grasp empathy is a worldwide affliction. Charities attempt to harness it, while governments and multinationals seem to want to distract people from it. However, empathy brings the most beauty to the world not only in the expressions of love that people show for each other, but also in the worlds of art, literature, and film. Actors have often noted that without empathy, there would be no film genre. The same is true for novels, poetry, sculpture, and other forms of communication that at a visceral level express empathy.
At this point, it’s useful to define empathy (what else is a dictionary besides an extension of our need to understand each other). Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of one another. More broadly, it’s the capacity to see, acknowledge, and, to whatever extent possible, share the feelings experienced by another.
Empathy may be defined as the ability to understand and share feelings, but it seems that there is a long way to go before empathy turns into action. Empathy alone may not make someone vote in a certain way– chemical plants do end up near elementary schools and funding for disability organizations gets scrapped, billionaires keep all their dollars pounds and yen in tax-free banks and we buy Chinese rather than American products because it’s cheaper. Empathy gets turned off, rather too easily in most cases.
On the path from empathy to action, there are at least two more definable middle areas to explore.
Empathy vs. Compassion
Compassion is empathy’s more spirited cousin. It’s the desire to alleviate another person’s suffering. Some argue that compassion is innate, while others believe it is acquired in early child. David Hume, an 18th century Scottish philosopher, believed that human beings, if imbued with compassion, were born that way. “There is some benevolence, however small, infused into our bosom,” he wrote, “some spark of friendship for human kind, some particle of the dove kneaded into our frame, along with the elements of the wolf and the serpent.”
The particle “of the dove” that Hume spoke of, is one that most believe needs nurturing, given that elements “of the wolf and the serpent” are also born into a person. The argument, then, advocates education and underlines its importance in cultivating a spark of empathy into compassion. Sadly, there is no accountability for teaching compassion to young people, like there is for teaching language or math. When was the last time you had heard of a school teaching a class in compassion or even read of it as part of a course syllabus? There are some notable examples, but not many (Stanford University runs a 9-week teacher training course on interpersonal dynamics and the pedagogy of compassion and it has been taught at a small but growing number of elementary and secondary schools). Leaving a kernel of compassion without fostering, either by parents or by schools, gives way to apathy and those wolf and serpent elements, following on those arguments.
February 29, 2012: at 12:33 p.m. Occupy protesters observing the national Shut Down The Corporations Day of Action begin to set up a “Food Bank” to give away food outside a Bank of America branch. They begin to set up an awning to protect the food from the pouring rain, but police seize the awning, and quickly clear the sidewalk, violently shoving people. One cop repeatedly strikes a photographer’s lens as Mandolin, one of event organizers, is carried off by his hands and feet.
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