AP Photo/Medecins Sans Frontieres, Stefano Zannini
As you know, we’ve been talking about empathy as the Powerful Word of the Month– which is so fitting, considering the devastating empathetic response and outpouring of help Haiti has been receiving after the tragic Earthquake last week. How has your heart opened up to Haiti? Have you been able to imagine yourself in their people’s shoes? Have you responded in anyway?
Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Empathic Civilization, wrote a fascinating and thought- provoking post on the global empathetic response for tragedies caused by Mother Nature and its bizarre juxtaposition with the amazing lack of response to human-induced fiascoes:
…recall when oil hit a record $147/barrel on world markets in July, 2008. Prices soared and basic necessities from food to heating oil became prohibitively expensive, imperiling the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings. Food riots broke out in more than 30 countries. Yet, the collective response of the human race was barely perceptible. Similarly, plagued with the real-time impacts of human induced climate change, which is already devastating ecosystems in countries around the world and creating millions of environmental refugees, the global response has been weak. The question is: why?
It’s a good question. Do we just throw up our hands when we feel that unfair situations brought on by human nature is somehow tolerable or not our business? Can we better put ourselves in other people’s shoes when mother nature happens to descend– or, like 9/11, when something tragic, that could have happened to anyone, that happened to many that we knew and loved, that involved hate, senseless violence, and intruders, crashes into our lives?
I think when we’re dealing with climate change, you are seeing the effects slowly. We aren’t bombarded with it on the news. We see the polar bears suffering– but only once in a while– when people happen to be discussing it. We seem to need to be hit over the head repeatedly to learn the score.
As for the barrels of oil that Mr. Rifkin mentions, we tend to grumble and groan about the injustice of it all, yet see it as unchangeable on our side. We cope. We live our lives. We fill up our cars. We turn on the heat. We don’t like it, but we do it. Yes, we become selfish in order to deal. Others were suffering and yet, from family to family, jobs were being lost, and it felt like “everyone is hurting.” We remained focused on ourselves, budgeting, and waiting out a bubble that we hoped would eventually burst.
With mother-nature tragedies, there is no bubble– there’s no time for a bubble. Just destruction. It’s so mammoth. It’s so wrong. We are inundated with information, real live stories, people we know who saw it– were there, are there. So our heart goes out. We are not “dealing” with the tragedy ourselves but watching it happen and so…we must help.
The real tragedy, then, is that we must wait for a global, mammoth, unstoppable force to come and devastate an area in order to deploy an empathetic response. Instead of finding daily, weekly, or monthly ways to help one another, to teach our children, we recoil and spring into action only when the tragedy is too big to ignore.
Are there any ways we can show empathy to others on a smaller scale? A more consistent scale? Perhaps then, the lesson can from the Haitian Earthquake can be that empathy and charity are all around us rather than having the presence of these powerful words rely only on global disasters.
