Inglath Cooper's Blog, page 28

What Empathy Is and What It's Not

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Empathy:  the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

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Something happened yesterday that's continued my thinking about this subject of empathy.

I volunteer for our local Humane Society and heard from some of my dog rescue friends that a mama and puppies had been found under a house trailer when the owner moved out and left them there.

As it turned out, there were two mamas and two litters of puppies.  In one of the litters, there was only one puppy left.  The others had wandered out into the nearby road and gotten hit by cars.  One mama had also been hit and had an untreated injury on one of her legs which may cause her to lose it.

These two dedicated rescuers spent several hours crawling back and forth under the trailer to bring out the total of fifteen puppies.  The place was in deplorable condition, and I can't even begin to imagine how these two women stayed at it for that long.  But they didn't leave until they'd gotten the very last one.  All seventeen dogs are now at the adoption center where they are being taken care of.

This is a situation where these poor dogs truly saw the worst and best of human behavior.  The human beings who left them there to starve did so without a speck of mercy.   There is no justification for this kind of abandonment.  A simple phone call would have brought help for these mamas and their puppies.  I can only think that such a decision to leave them there was rooted in a total lack of care for what would happen to them.

And then there are the two women who spent an entire afternoon working to save them.  This is mercy at its most benevolent.  At its most selfless.  The kind I have to believe has "well done my good and faithful servant" waiting as its acknowledgement after this life is done.[image error]

How is it that some people can walk away from a situation like this, leaving the nearly helpless to fend for themselves?  And others will jeopardize their own well-being to right that wrong?

I know which side I want to be on.

M.E.

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Me

I wonder if it could be said that every bad decision we ever make starts with ME.  ME want.  ME need.  ME feel.

I've recently been drawn to watching shows like Lockup and the Investigative Discovery channel.  I've found myself fascinated  by the whys behind the things that people do to land themselves in a Federal prison charged with something horrendous like murder.  At first, the interest felt sort of like turning my head to glance at a car wreck when I drive by, knowing all along that I don't want that image in my mind.

I think what I find most fascinating in a disturbing kind of way is how almost every single case starts and ends with ME.  He dissed me.  He disrespected me.  He had more than I had so I took some of his.  She stole my boyfriend.  

The awful thing is that in listening to each of those individuals talk about their life in prison and how they got there, there is almost never any expressed awareness of the part that pride and self-first played in their crime.  And even after they are in prison and get into conflicts with other prisoners, their interpretation is most likely that it's the other guy's fault.

Each time I listen to one of these interviews, I come away from it thinking about the ME focus of the person's explanation for their crime.  ME.  Missing Empathy.  M.E.

We're missing empathy when we can't or won't put ourselves in another person's position or imagine what it would feel like if someone inflicted upon us what we're inflicting upon them.

Wouldn't it be amazing if someone could flip a switch, and we could all see the world and the others who live here with empathy and a desire to understand another's position, pain, fear or hopes?

I wonder if our prisons would be as full as they are today.