It Shouldn’t Be This Hard To Have Empathy

The headline of a Huffington Post article from 2017 comes into my mind often: I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people. Kayla Chadwick’s headline is enduringly relevant, particularly now, as the dual issues of racial injustice and the generational pandemic expose a me-first attitude in an alarming number of Americans.

Too many people have a difficult time absorbing what it means to be empathetic. Empathy is not sympathy: to be empathetic is not to directly relate to another person’s problems; it is to understand them as though we ourselves are having them, even if we aren’t. Grasping that, and then exercising it, shouldn’t be a profoundly difficult task. We are humans in the 21st-century with access to more information than anyone ever. There’s no excuse for disregarding other people’s problems.

And yet: America in particular is having a tough time. The Republican Party has built itself over the years as the gathering place for people who refuse to accept that others have problems. Think about how much opposition there is to basic human rights. The Black Lives Matter movement is denigrated as too radical, or marxist(?), or racist against white people (seriously). Fear-mongering and race-baiting has bred hostility to empathetic immigrant policies. Giving people health care is controversial.