Empathy in politics today (or lack thereof)

It came to me in a flash. Empathy. It is what America lacks in our new age of military power and so-called patriotism. It is the piece of the puzzle that we all cannot put our finger on. It is what world domination and unfounded, extreme fear have done to the people of our country. We lack basic empathy for other human beings around the world and we do not realize it. We see this lack of empathy as patriotism. To Americans this lack of regard for others is self-preservation. Our President likes to say it is “us against them.” However, when “them” is anyone who does not agree with us it puts into question whether it is really them at all.

I never realized the dichotomy Americans live in until President Bush clarified it for us as a national movement. Our society does see every situation in terms of good or evil. Everyone in the world to us is either right or wrong, black or white, bad or good. We have become a society of one-hour news programs where there must be an answer at the end of the program as to who was correct. The mystery must be solved and the winner heralded as such. Each conflict or problem in the world is under-reported in our country until the press can clearly see a moral winner or an evil doer. Once such a person or group can be identified, we take the side of the good guy and cheer for the team. It is amazing the atrocities that we can ignore while waiting for the clear moral majority to show itself. Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, South Africa, the Philippines, Tibet and multiple countries in Central America (to name a few) have been victims of our dichotomy. Our need to wait until one clear team is apparent before we offer aid to human beings suffering in the middle. The problem is that in a world where you only see good and evil you miss the fact that most people in the country are not on the team. They are not playing the game at all. They are just trying to live through the day and raise their children.

I have been trying to educate myself about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A conflict, which has raged on, as each side, insists that it is right and the other side completely wrong. We in America do not hear both sides in the newspaper or on TV. We do not hear the people in the middle. The people that admit that both sides are right and wrong at the same time. This would require the media in America to commit thought and different perspectives to the conflict, which instead is made to seem black and white. It would require American journalists to do a new story where no one is right or wrong and there is no answer at the end of the one-hour show. There would be no bad guy and no sheriff. Just people suffering through a difficult situation with no clear correct outcome. Not exactly a show made for the people of America. So instead, Americans try to fit the situation into the dialogue we know. There is a good guy who is somehow hurt by the bad guy. The new sheriff goes into town and clears out the bad guy and the town is saved. Now that is a good movie! Americans want life to be that movie. We have created that movie and we even got a sheriff from Texas to take the lead role. It is every director’s dream and those directing this show have had a good run with the concept.

Empathy is the prescription for the problem. Empathy is the genuine feeling of another’s pain or problems. It is the proverbial putting yourself in another’s shoes. It hurts. Empathy is uncomfortable. In a world where, even in close personal relationships, we try to distance ourselves so we do not get hurt, empathy is foreign to us. Most parents want to teach empathy to their toddlers around the time they are teaching them to share. We ask them to think about how others feel when they take a toy from someone or hit someone. In Christianity Jesus was extremely empathetic. He tried to teach empathy to his followers as he asked them to forgive the once unforgivable or to accept the unaccepted. Just as a father would teach his son to think of others, Jesus came to tell us that we need to think about the needs of others. That we should care about the people who have nothing and the people who go without and we should do something about it. People tend to believe the Old Testament was just God doling out punishments and being angry all the time. God wanted people to have empathy for one another. He championed the slaves and brought them out of bondage. He sent prophets to ask the people to repent for their sins. He spoke to Abraham about saving the cities for those righteous people. God said that if there were righteous people in a city then He would not destroy it. The message being, you do not indiscriminately destroy populations for the misdeeds of the few. If there is but one righteous person then the whole population must be spared. This is at odds with our current dichotomy of “if you are not with us you are against us.”

In a time when people are claiming moral superiority and family values I find it disheartening that the basic lesson of empathy has been lost in our culture. On a global level, it is rather obvious that we as Americans care about countries only as far as it affects us. Countries that have oil or resources that we need automatically warrant more time and money. On a political level that is good business, on a religious level that is sinful. This, however, has been carried to the extreme in the past several years. When the cold war ended, we could no longer claim that the spread of communism was the great evil that we were fighting. We suddenly had to begin interpreting situations on a case-by-case basis where it is much harder to find the bad guy and the sheriff. The 1980’s and 1990’s attempted to do this in a diplomatic and empathetic way. By carefully looking at the situation and stepping in when atrocities were taking place the leaders of that day attempted to control situations that were out of control. The leaders attempted to protect human life while continuing to promote the safety and well-being of our citizens in the United States. No leader is perfect, nor could they be in a world that is not black and white. Clearly, President Clinton missed an opportunity in Rwanda, which he has repeatedly said was his worst decision ever as President. It takes an honorable man to admit a mistake such as this. The point, however, is that decisions were based on the result to the people of the country in which we were fighting. The outcomes of these missions were not measured by how it helped the United States. The results were measured by how it helped the people in the countries to live better and safer lives. Look at any conflict we were engaged in during the past 20 years (military or in a peacekeeping fashion). Success was not measured as a US victory or as a way to help ourselves. Success was measured by how safe the people in the country were after the conflict. Success was measured by human lives changed not American lives made better. Our country has lost that desire and we are not the better for it.

Today America is looking out for America. We are not interested in participating in the UN or following the very international laws we helped create. John Bolton has been sent to the UN to attempt to change the rules that govern torture and war so that America can do what it wants without international consequences. Read the changes Bolton proposed for the UN and his agenda (and the agenda for the administration) is clear. The rights and lives of human beings are not among the priorities of this administration. By framing the worldwide community as with us or against us, either good or evil, Bush has created an environment where anything goes. We no longer need to think about what is right or wrong. We do not need to have empathy for others because they are by definition automatically evil for not being Americans. Even Americans who disagree are targeted as evil for not agreeing with every decision made by the administration. Suddenly lives do not matter unless they are American lives. Safety and security is only important for Americans and we must achieve this at all costs regardless of human life abroad. This dangerous turn to patriotism above empathy is what has sparked the fear among Americans who care about human rights and human life. We have history to show us what happens when countries believe themselves more important than the people and we must learn from the mistakes of these older, possibly wiser countries. It was Freud who taught us that having an out of control ego can only cause trouble down the line and Bush has created the ultimate in overdeveloped egos by creating this us against them dichotomy. By naming this lack of empathy and complete self-worship patriotism and Christian this administration has been able to quell any opposition by labeling dissenters as traitors or evil. Our country is in dangerous territory both politically and spiritually but it is masked by the loyalty to the flag and the misperception that dissent means not supporting our troops.

The number of examples of this lack of empathy for human life is overwhelming. The most pervasive among Americans, however, is their acceptance of the Iraq War. Our President lied to us about intelligence in order to create a false reason to attack a sovereign country that has never attacked us. When this lie was uncovered, the President made no apology for the fact that he had sent our troops into a war on false pretenses. He just changed the reason for war now stating that, “We are fighting the terrorists there so we don’t have to fight them here.” What a horrendous reason to kill 150,000 innocent Iraqi citizens. We want to use their country to attract terrorists and kill them so that we do not have to put our citizens at risk. How nice for us living in America. How terrible for those people whose country is now the battleground for a war that had nothing to do with them. They were just dispensable people in dispensable houses and businesses where our government could get away with sending our military. Americans accepted this as a good reason to have a war. No one seems to have any empathy for those Iraqi mothers and children who have no food, water, shelter or security thanks to our President. We can only think of our own children who are safe in school and at the corner grocery store. Their lives have turned into a hell of suicide bombers and American bombs taking out neighborhoods and businesses but our lives have gone on as if nothing has happened. To Americans the later is the only important thing.

Think also of the troops involved in this war. I see “support our troops” magnets everywhere. Are we really supporting our troops when we support a war started under false pretenses? I believe we would be supportive of them by insisting that the President tell us the truth before sending our sons and daughters and fathers and mothers to war. Empathy would require us to look into the eyes of these soldiers and say that we did everything to keep them from going to war. True empathy would mean putting ourselves in the shoes of those soldiers as they leave their pregnant wives maybe never to return to see their son or daughter. Don’t we owe them the truth about why they are going to war? We should respect those men and women enough to avoid a war until we absolutely cannot avoid it any longer. I hear all of these World War II veterans chanting support your troops, send them to die for their country. Their President did not send them to war until the US was forced to respond by the attack on Pearl Harbor, years after the war began. We are not supporting our troops when we send them to war and then go on with our own lives as if there were no war. We do not have empathy for our troops when we tell the grieving widow that her husband died for his country and then we enjoy tax cuts that would fund an increase in death benefits. Americans are not a country at war as they were in WWII. Everyone made sacrifices to fund that war and to keep America running. Now Americans support the war as long as someone else’s son has to go fight. I love seeing all of these young republicans on college campuses wearing their “support our troops” buttons. They can chant the “fight them over there” mantra as well as any FOX news analyst, but they are not about to sign up to go fight the terrorists over there. That is a lack of empathy. A lack of compassion for those men and women who are in the military because they saw it as a way out of poverty or a way into college and who trusted that the President would not use them as a pawn but would instead respect them as a person.

Now we are at a point where leaving Iraq in the condition that we created may cause even more turmoil than staying. This is how we made an enemy of Osama bin Laden in the first place; when we promised to help Afghanistan and then we left when it was at its most vulnerable. We took a relatively stable country and we have created chaos and a breeding ground for terrorists. The people who once liked America or were neutral about our country now hate us and are ready to fight and die to defeat us. Many of those people now would stand in line at the opportunity to come here to the US and inflict pain and suffering on our people as we have on them. This war was the greatest recruitment initiative ever for Al Queda and Osama bin Laden solely because they recognize America’s lack of empathy for anyone else in the world. In a world of only good and evil Americans are now seen as evil for simply being American, just as so many of our citizens see every other country as evil. Just as in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict where no one is totally right or wrong, there are normal everyday people affected by each decision our President makes. These people have done nothing evil or wrong. They are just people trying to live their lives. These people are American soldiers and these people are Iraqi children. They deserve empathy from our leader and empathy from our citizens for the lives that have been forced upon them for the past 4 years.

Before supporting any war, put yourself in the shoes of each person who is truly affected by the war. The men and women who have lost limbs and sight. The babies who will never meet their father. The men and women who cannot sleep at night or who cannot return to work or relationships due to PTSD. The men, women and children in Iraq who have no home, no electricity, and no assurance of food for tomorrow. The women of Iraq who have had much more freedom than most Muslim countries but are about to lose those freedoms to another theocracy. The children who have lost their parents and their future thanks to our need to “fight them over there.” Empathy requires us to think of these things rather than only of ourselves.

I commend the men and women of our country that do have empathy for others in the face of these atrocities. The men and women who serve our country and try to help the Iraqis although they know their President has misled them. I praise the people who have gone to Iraq to help the citizens of that country and who try to show Iraqis that some Americans do care about their maimed children. The people who have risked being called a traitor by speaking out against this unjust dichotomy but have done it anyway. Americans are not all as callous and negative as this administration. There are millions of compassionate and empathetic people out there attempting to right the wrongs of the world. The “we” discussed above is not every American. It is the Americans represented by this administration and the people making the decisions in America today. It is any American still buying into the idea of fighting the terrorists there so that our lives may be sparred. There were not any terrorists there until we opened the door and asked them to join us for a jihad. Americans must wake up and find the compassion within. Americans must stop seeking revenge for 911 in the most convenient arena and insist that we seek justice from the people involved. Although finding the actual perpetrators of the crime is much more difficult and not as exciting to watch each night on the news, it is the right thing to do. It is the compassionate thing to do. It is the Christian thing to do. It is the American thing to do.