Redtree Times

Universal Symbol for Empathy

Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the wrong. Sometime in life you will have been all of these.

― George Washington Carver

Let’s continue this Thanksgiving week’s stream of virtues with a biggie: empathy. The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes or see through their eyes. To feel their emotions, to try to perceive the circumstances of their life.

As Walt Whitman put it in the immortal Song of Myself, describing his time as a hospital aide during the Civil War when he nursed severely wounded Union soldiers:

I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.

It seems like a simple thing, a natural reaction for most decent people. But it is, unfortunately, becoming a more and more scarce entity. It sometimes feels like there is a total absence of empathy in this world with some folks. Or maybe it’s that they have managed to lop their empathy into smaller bits, reserving it only for people who look and speak and think like themselves.

Empathy is sometimes even mocked these days, derided as a symptom of weakness or softness, something to be exploited. My persona view on this is that empathy is actually a strength, something that allows you to feel compassion with those in need while at the same time giving you the ability to understand and perhaps predict how your adversaries might act.

In this case, a lack of empathy is actually a hinderance to those with less than honorable intentions.This thought takes me back to the words of Gustav Gilbert who was the psychologist at Spandau Prison where the Nazi war crimes defendants were held in 1945:

I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.

Conversely, goodness would include the presence of empathy.

Most of you out there reading this are empathetic folks. If not, you most likely wouldn’t have read this far or be following this blog. So, this is just preaching to the choir. But can you make others feel empathy or, at least, more empathetic to a wider range of others?

I would guess that this can only occur through a willingness to display your own empathy with patience and grace. Much like the words of advice at the top from George Washington Carver.

Do I know this for sure?

No. But who or what can it hurt?

It can only help in some way or another. Try it…

I most likely start the first part of the treatment for my prostate cancer later this morning, so I am a little distracted this morning. But I thought this post from several years back fit nicely with this week devoted to giving thanks.

One benefit from the display of cruelty and hatred on display from the current administration is that their obvious lack of compassion and empathy is so egregious that even those of us who might not have had an awareness of our own empathy in the past are now paying a bit more attention to how they treat and interact with others.

I might be mistaken with that observation, but I hope not. For one thing, I would so love the irony that those who have waged a war on “woke” might have actually awakened that very reaction in the many folks who have allowed their native empathy to lag in recent years.

But more importantly, I would love to live in a world filled with empathy, compassion, and generosity. A world where greed, bigotry, and cruelty are driven back into the dark corners where they belong, not parading proudly down Main Street.

Give me beauty over ugliness any day of the week.

Maybe that’s asking too much but I don’t think it is.

I am adding a song that I have shared a few times over the years, Try a Little Tenderness. I have always shared the Otis Redding version which for me is the absolute gold standard. I have known and loved that version for almost sixty years but didn’t know that it was written in 1932 by Jimmy Campbell, Reg Connelly, and Harry Woods. Or that it has been recorded by a huge number of singers over the many years, many before and after Otis. Bing Crosby first recorded it in 1933 and Frank Sinatra in 1946. I thought I’d share the Sinatra version here this morning. This version is from 1960 with an arrangement from Nelson Riddle. Different than Otis but lovely.

Be kind out there, Try a little tenderness.