Expressing empathy
A snowy field off Hartland Hill Road in Woodstock, Vermont. (Gareth Henderson Photo)
If the road to bipartisan solutions in the new U.S. Congress appeared rocky before, it’s looking close to vertical now, with the latest COVID-19 relief bill passing the Senate on Saturday by just one vote.
But the future is very broad, and this country is a resilient one. With progress being made toward the end of the pandemic, we can still look toward the upcoming months with hope.
In his 2019 book, “What Unites Us”, veteran journalist Dan Rather says empathy is a foundational part of this country. He speaks of the nation’s empathy and its sustaining power as an important aspect which propelled the U.S. to be victorious in World War II, even as we emerged from the Great Depression.
“Empathy builds community. Communities strengthen a country and its resolve and will to fight back,” Rather writes. “We were never as unified in national purpose as we were in those days. What had weakened us had also made us stronger.”
The past 12 months have accentuated plenty of good and kindness among us, and have also exposed the chasms in our politics. Without sustained bipartisanship around the latest COVID-19 relief bill going through Congress, you might ask, what opportunity do we have to build unity among our national leaders? Perhaps the beginning of the answer is in our communities, where acts of kindness continue to inspire and lift people up. Though pessimism, doubt and fear can seem very pervasive, our future depends on what we choose to look at and accept.
Even today, there’s still a basis for believing in goodness we can build on. Take the example of New Jersey plumber Andrew Mitchell, and his wife, Kisha Pinnock, and her brother, Isaiah Pinnock. They drove 22 hours to Houston, Texas, to help out during last month’s brutal storm, when local plumbers were entirely overwhelmed and people needed help right away. They stayed there for a couple of weeks, beyond the time they’d originally planned. With this and countless examples of compassion and kindness from the past year, it’s plain that the soul of our nation still counts empathy as one of its strong attributes.
The question is, how do we harness that value on a national scale today, so it impacts the way major decisions are made? There’s no firm answer to that question, but each of us can contribute by striving to bring our best qualities to the forefront of interactions with others. We have the opportunity, each day, to share empathy, love and compassion with the world. By doing so, we’re forming a foundation for larger change to take place.
The path ahead will test our patience, our resolve, and our very strength. No doubt: Instilling meaningful change based in empathy may well take longer than we’d like. However, true change will heal us as a people and cause us to exist more peaceably together. And that more peaceful, harmonious existence is something we can each cultivate. By filling our own hearts with empathy, we inspire others to do the same. That is the positive reinforcement of good, a repeatable goal we can embrace and share, and one that can truly unite us.
— Gareth Henderson
