Empathy Can Change the World

How realistic video games are! We can attack with impunity people who seem more real and less important every time we engage them. Blood, destruction, death—all sanitized so our children can adapt to our violent world where elementary students must be afraid of murderous death. Once, parents worried about the number of murders shown on television. Now cyber murders far outnumber them, and parents buy the games for home use. Real military weapons may soon become available through the mail.

War looked different when we stopped glorifying it with war dramas and carefully edited news reports of world war. Because of the daring of combat journalists and their news agencies, from the comfort of our living rooms we watched uncensored fear, dismemberment, and death in Vietnam on television for the first time. For a while, we were appalled and wanted wars to end. But we stopped watching. The draft ended. Meanwhile, the reports of various disasters around the world and several within our borders (i.e. hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and wildfires) distracted us temporarily. A government bent on demonizing unwanted genetic lines and destroying the icons of our ancestry and democracy angered us. But we can’t care about everything bad at once, and the manipulators know it. We just can’t. So we don’t.

To donate to an immediate disaster fund for the flood in Nepal, I went online to an appeal for funds from Nepal itself. I found a series of photos of the consequences of a melting glacier and ignored warnings from climatologists about the limitations of a dam. The photos didn’t include only distant views and heroic moments. A huge elegant riverside building (a tourist hotel?) crumbled into the rushing waters. I was reminded of the film 2012 as a real-life bridge crowded with panicked people in cars, trucks, and on foot broke in half and the frantic passengers were swept into the furious torrent of brown water. The reality dwarfed CGI because I could feel the terror, the despair. Empathy can change the world. It hurts.

When I watched workers struggle to drag naked, bloated bodies out of the suction of shoreline muck, I began to cry. Corpses of beautiful people lay scattered along the edge of the water—moms, granddads, lovely young girls, children. Some looked like they were resting, except their legs lay at unlikely angles. My tears became sobs.

Why should we want to view disasters—including wars–without blinders? Because we’re connected to those people. For example, some of us had family or friends happily touring or working in the Nepalese valley. Even if we didn’t have a personal tie to anyone there, we’re impacted. The entire earth is being forced to change. It’s one complex system. We need empathy to urge us to pay attention to dangers that could be avoided or wars that don’t need to happen. When we’re told we could be next, it isn’t a dramatic ploy we can shrug off. It’s future history. Our planet is small. We need to huddle together and use our internationally combined intelligences, resources, and creativity to plan for a better global reality, because we’re the ancestors who are designing what’s next. We are hope and optimism, if we dare. We are the children of Creation.