Letters to the Editor
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on empathy @Weeping etc.
Actually, from a certain point of view this makes sense: the ability to empathize necessarily means the ability to shift perspectives.Perhaps this kind of shifting strikes some people as duplicitous or as lacking a core.
This is also a topic I think about a lot as it is very woven into the work I do every day. For one thing, I deal part of my day with autism, in which empathy and theory of mind is a huge deficit. So I am constantly aware of doing things to help someone with severe deficits in this to move toward more awareness of others.
For myself, my job requires that I shift perspectives constantly. I work in one community that is racially mixed, (Latino, Black, white) with mostly low-income children, then drive 20 miles to a county known as "the home of the free and the white" that, as far as I know, in the past 20 years has had one Black family, living on the county line, and they didn't stay there long.
I work in the home on a very personal level with families who parent in ways that are sometimes pretty hard to watch. I have to sell myself to them as their ally in raising their child. And then I have to deal with the child's agenda which is often not aligned with their therapy agenda or with their parent's agenda for them. (kids just wanna have fun!). I have to sell myself to these kids so they bond with me because sometimes I'm with them for 15 years twice a week, in their home. Then I have to shift empathy to the national corporation I work for that is putting profits above service now, and I'm not doing quite so hot on that front lately. My supervisors have actually told me to stop trying to help my patients so much. hmmm.
I've been doing this many years now and it changes you. You see many things differently. Plus I drive a lot and this gives me "thinking time" to process all of this.
So I am shifting, shifting, adjusting to up to 12 different homes a day.
"The important thing is not to stop questioning" Albert Einstein
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yup
Heartening to read your sister's words, thanks for sharing them!
I was tepid on Obama for months, precisely because I was hung up on whether he was liberal/progressive enough. Eventually I got what he was up to and recognized just how radical his vision actually is.
"It isn't the calculating pragmatism of immediate political opportunism however, it is a pragmatism grounded in a better and more informed vision of where this country needs to go." Exactly. This is the suspicion about centrism or pragmatism, and it's a valid one, imo. But in this case, I think it's unfounded. Sure, he's still a politician and a case can be made that he's just an opportunist, but so far, such arguments just don't convince me.
One can seize an opportunity without being an opportunist. It's called rising to the occasion, which is what he did in his speech, refusing to pander (for the most part, anyway) and yet refusing to default to siege mentality. He attempted to demonstrate empathy for others ("If all I'd seen were those clips, I'd be repulsed too" and "White people can be concerned about crime without being racists") while asking that that empathy be reciprocated ("Anger in the black community is not going away and it's legitimate, if unproductive").
Sigh.
It saddens me that so much vitriol continues to fly around.
God, the speech was so rich, so complex, so full of things to talk about...
Why didn't Salon spend more time actually discussing the content of what he said?
A golden opportunity, wasted.
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@uncle Fester
there's no guarantee to a stream of pork.
Exactly. I think he has a strong libertarian streak woven into his more traditional liberal values. We need to support individual initiative, avoid mandates, encourage responsible behavior, self-sufficiency etc.
Maybe it's just me seeing what I'd like to see, as he warns his supporters might do, but I think he has consistently tried to move toward a new definition of what it means to be a Democrat. No way is it like the triangulation approach of Bill Clinton, nor is it any kind of compromising of principles. It is based on a very deep core understanding of the Constitution and what America's idealistic promise is.
And this libertarian streak definitely appeals to ideas I developed as an unschooling parent.
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why not indeed?
God, the speech was so rich, so complex, so full of things to talk about...Why didn't Salon spend more time actually discussing the content of what he said?A golden opportunity, wasted.-- weeping for brunnhilde
Maybe they're just slow on the uptake.
Cable news has been of course slow, too, but I see more signs of intelligent life peeking out occasionally. Maybe everyone needs more time to assimilate then they can begin to accomodate new ideas.
Maybe we can hope for the future.
"I think it's realistic to have hope. One can be a perverse idealist and say the easiest thing: 'I despair. The world's no good.' That's a perverse idealist. It's practical to hope, because the hope is for us to survive as a human species. That's very realistic." Studs Terkel
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@ unschooler
Wow, that sounds incredibly taxing, having to balance all those competing interests, especially given your ultimate goal is to help real people. Must be especially hard to balance the parent-child relationship against your own expertise and goals. Such commendable work.
For my part, I've been in all sorts of environments, so I too appreciate shifting perspectives.
I'm a black male and went first to been to private schools with mostly wealthy whites, then to public school with working class whites, then to high school at the height of racial tensions due to primarily to bussing.
I remember a sign, hand-written, on the door of my corner store, during the Iran hostage crisis: "If you are Iranian, stay out! Free all hostages now!"
Very chilling, needless to say. Prior to that, I'd seen "colored only" in books, but to see such animosity in real life (I must have been about 7) was something of a loss of innocence moment.
I've lived abroad, am married to a European, have relatives in the projects.
So certainly a major attraction to Obama for me is that I identify with him.
And I identify viscerally with Michelle's comments about not having been steeped in having pride in America.
I wish people could appreciate why for black people, even black people who have managed an extraordinary degree of success, such feelings of caution always remain, feelings that one will be vulnerable no matter what one's apparent successes.
Jewish friends of mine get it.
Ah, so much work to do to get us understanding one another.
So much work.