Empathy...how many of us have it?

Dr. Straker’s paper reveals some particularly important questions for the reader. What do we do if our own morality comes into question? How can we be empathetic to those who we might not agree with? These questions get right to the heart of the article. In the paper Dr. Straker deals with the fact that one of her patients, Stanley,—one who she supports politically and emotionally—relishes a murder that took place at the hands of a frenzied mob. Dr. Straker tires to justify supporting Stanley despite her repulsion to his actions. She manages to do so—to an extent—by saying that Stanley represented “goodness, hope” and all that is good in the world.

I have a similar problem as Dr.Straker and it involves my feelings of empathy towards those who are less fortunate than I—not that I am fortunate anyway. Television adds that tell me “just a dollar a day could save little Becky’s life” along with the media’s constant need to show images of carnage and horror amount to what Jean Baudrillard calls disaster pornography. My aversion to these media images has allowed me to pass by the homeless without being able to acknowledge them in their downtrodden state. I have, to some extent, become closed off to my fellow man.

While Dr. Straker’s scenario is not completely synonymous with my own, they still both deal with understanding our empathetic relationship to the Other. Her own moral values are in conflict with Stanley’s actions. My moral values are in question because I can have more sympathy for a suffering animal than I do for a suffering person.

Having said that, let me back track a little and do some more explaining. Bauldrillard also talks about “compassion fatigue” where an individual is so oversaturated with images of horror it becomes difficult for him/her to be empathetic. When someone hears about “little Becky” how many people actually care, and of those who care how many of them believe that their money actually gets to Becky?

I think that there is no hard and fast answer, but what I think helps to make it easy is for individuals to leave room for change in their concepts of morality, ethics, empathy and any other important concepts that relate to how we understand the world and interact with each other. Vera, I am hoping, will assist in this process of learning and being open to change. And so I leave my fellow class mates with a few questions.

1) Is someone internally bankrupt if he can turn a blind eye to suffering?

2) Am I morally bankrupt for being able to be more sympathetic towards a suffering animal than a suffering person?

3) How and why should we be empathetic in world that continues to make it difficult?

4) What are the implications of a media filled with images of horror and its effect on how we empathize with others and understand ourselves?

Chad Out!

Help

Since it is midterms and everyone is stressed, I thought I would post this week and try to keep the lively conversation going that started in seminar this morning. What I am posting here is an essay I wrote for a contest last year (it didn't win). The prompt was "When was the moment you became a grown-up?" The essay that follows reflects on the experience I shared with you this morning about my summer in Mexico. So in some ways it is about structural violence and how an individual interfaces with social forces. In some ways it is about how a 19-year-old compulsive "helper" reacts to situations very much like those described by Professor Stein this morning during our role-playing exercise. It is also about trying to decide what to do with your life when you only semi-know who you are. Please feel free to respond to it on any of those levels or to keep talking about what we were talking about this morning: how your own style/sense of self works with or against the culture of your agency.

AMIGOS

I was leaning against a gnarled tree trunk, inches away from a half-constructed latrine and what seemed like a million miles away from my Ohio home. As I drifted in and out of an amoeba-induced stupor, sun-encircled silhouettes of Mexican villagers wandered by to check on la chica who had come from so far away to build latrines, educate them about the disease cycle, and pass out toothbrushes.

Full of bright-eyed idealism and very little Spanish, I arrived in Mexico three weeks earlier with my shiny copy of Donde No Hay Doctor and a vague notion that I needed to befriend someone with a donkey (concrete being very heavy). While I must have looked ridiculous to my hosts – my look in those days, not to mention my worldview, was heavily influenced by “Out of Africa” and first-wave Banana Republic -- it seemed only natural for me to be there. I had always been very idealistic, from canvassing my conservative Cincinnati playground for Carter to spending my spring breaks building playgrounds for kids in the hollers of Appalachia.

When my younger partners first entered the two-room house where we would spend the next six weeks, they chuckled at the Pepto-pink wall paint and the picture of the Last Supper duct-taped above the table. As the veteran work-camper, and relative old lady at age 19, I sanctimoniously reminded them of the generosity of our hosts in moving their ten-person family into one room so we could have the other. We did not have to share their decorating tastes, we just had to build them some latrines. My partners looked both chastened and irritated; I dropped iodine into my canteen, unrolled my sleeping bag and went to find a man with a donkey.

While doing volunteer work in a Mexican village was consistent with childhood dreams, it was also a key step in my adult plan to do diplomatic work overseas. I was planning on majoring in Soviet Studies, to help those folks turn their swords into ploughshares. My complete inability to learn Russian or Economics during my freshman year of college disappeared in the bright light of my desire to save the world and my fantastic British-empire-meets-army-surplus wardrobe. And now, even as I faced resistance from the villagers – latrines would get half built and everyone would continue to use the same places not the “requisite distance from the water source” (Donde No Hay Doctor) – I was undaunted.

Until I was undone by a popsicle at a soccer game. While I religiously treated my drinking water, at 19 I could still have my head turned by the ice cream truck and never thought for a moment what popsicles are made of. After about a week of racing from that pink room to the half-latrine, I decided abjectly to camp out under the nearby tree.

As I shifted my rapidly-decreasing weight off the trunk, a villager stepped out of the sun and into view. It was my man with the donkey, who had been delivering bags of concrete to latrine sites for us. He sat down next to me and asked “mala es stomacha?” I nodded. He nodded back and said sympathetically, “Same thing happened to me in Detroit.”

While it could have been the amoebas, or the sound of a latrine caving in (let’s face it, I didn’t know what the hell I was doing), I felt as if I was suddenly aware of a shell, forged by countless volunteer hours, church pot-lucks and illusions of how the world worked, cracking open. In a kind of reverse birth, my adult self emerged from it, sticky, disoriented and asking questions. Was this generous donkey man just like me: someone who, in the course of his life journey, found himself far away from home, drinking from a hostile water supply and falling ill? Or was the point that he was nothing like me – he was a failed migrant worker with no safety nets while I would soon go home to excellent healthcare, a supportive family and a college education? And which one would have made me more comfortable? Why was I here? Are single acts of community service dwarfed by structural inequities of wealth, health, and national boundaries? And, now that I had gotten started, what was the point of help, really, when you were welcome to hand out toothbrushes to folks with pretty good teeth (beans and tortillas 3x a day were clearly better for the teeth than my childhood diet of cherry Icees and Pop Rocks) but were barred from even mentioning birth control to people whose living conditions were limited by the enormous families and near-continuous pregnancy of the women? I started to feel mentally incontinent, as well.

My last few weeks in the village were spent drinking Coke at la tienda (a big Donde No Hay no no) and watching “Dallas” on its sad little black and white tv, taking my host family out to dinner in a stupidly extravagant restaurant in town (what did it matter that they could have better used the money? I was a full time citizen of the grey area now, man!), and wryly observing just what aspects of American culture seemed to make it down here (“Dallas”) and what didn’t (bathrooms).

The last 22 years have been about both learning the deep implications of that lesson underneath the tree -- and unlearning them. One of the last pieces of mail I received in Mexico was my freshman year report card. Reading of my miserable grades in Russian and Economics and my A in classical literature, all while under that tree, seemed like an omen and put me on the fast track to English graduate school and away from diplomatic service. I didn’t leave the Ivory tower for 13 years, becoming an expert in turning B+ students into A- ones at colleges favored by the upper-middle classes. I have returned to Mexico only once since then – to Club Med in Cancun, the spring break trip I had never had as a do-gooder teen.

I am a teacher, not a Wall Street executive, so I must have retained some idealism. A few pieces of shell never did get shaken off. But I decidedly stepped off my childhood path of working concretely for social justice. In many ways, life conspired to conceal this as a choice. I stayed in school, got married, had kids, moved for my husband’s jobs and he for mine. The balancing act of teaching and family felt plenty like volunteer work and I didn’t think too hard about the road not taken (or the latrines not built). Until we moved for my husband’s job once again and I went from a cushy private school teaching the cream of the parochial school crop (still couldn’t talk about birth control there, either) to teaching at an urban public school, full of underserved, first-generation college students, many of whom speak English about as well as I spoke Spanish (not to mention Russian).

The first year was about as unsettling as those weeks beneath the tree. All my years of teaching had not remotely prepared me to teach these particular students. My courses in Victorian literature were probably about as useful as those half-built latrines. But over the past couple years, hunched over stacks of papers written in Spanglish or in meetings with students who were trying to imagine a life far from the villages of their parents, I have heard the familiar cracking sound. While it could have been my aging back or the sound of my sons breaking something in the next room, I think it was a shell. This shell, forged from years of arcane academic discourse, self-sufficient students, and exquisitely landscaped campuses, was, too, falling away. Emerging, sticky but newly oriented, is another adult self. This one bears somewhat of a resemblance (alas, not physically) to that idealistic teenager, who knows what she did not – that we live in a tangled world – but remembers what she did -- that we can make that world a better place one act at a time.

Where is Fairness?

“The American criminal justice system is racist, classist, sexist and oppressive. Please, correct me if I am wrong,” Thomas Giovanni, my mentor, said to me on the first day of my internship in Neighborhood Defenders Service of Harlem (NDS). At that time I did not correct him. He gave me the whole year to find some evidence that could prove his statement wrong. And I sincerely wished to prove him wrong. Every experience that I am getting from my internship, however, proves that he is a one hundred percent right. One may object: “How come? We are the most just nation in the whole world, with our rights of freedom of speech, religion, and so on….” Now, I want to give you the same task as my mentor gave to me. Would you be able to prove to me that the U. S. criminal justice system is not classist, racist, sexist and oppressive?
While entering the Court Downtown Manhattan, we saw the quotes that are put on the top of its building. The first one is by Epicurus: “Only the just man enjoys peace of mind,” which, to put into simple words, translates: “Please, come over and if you are not guilty, you have nothing to be afraid of.” Can a person who was taken by police (whether they were guilty or not), all terrified and scared, after having spent twenty-four hours in arraignment, have a peace of mind while entering the building of the Court? The whole look of the Court with its massive columns, all lawyers dressed up professionally, and policemen everywhere, is scary, if not terrifying. Can this person enjoy a peace of mind at that stage of his or her lives?
The second quote reads: “Every place is safe to him who lives in justice, be just and fear not.” My interpretation of this quote is: “If you have not committed a crime, you do not have to be afraid of anything because our criminal justice system treats everybody equally.” I wonder whether there is any truth to that statement. Two examples from life prove the opposite. The first one involved a eighteen-year-old girl who was eight months pregnant. She was put into prison for shoplifting (I still cannot forget that horror) because she did not have enough financial resources to survive. The second one involved a wealthy Asian gentleman who, armed with two lawyers, was able to get a less severe punishment than the poor pregnant girl. Can anybody please point out any fairness in that example? Our system can make mistakes. Innocent people are put into prison. After twenty years in prison for something that they did not do, how can individuals return to a normal life? Twenty years passed, everything has changed. What is normal now? They have no families (rarely, a family is waiting for somebody to get out of prison). They cannot find a job because of the criminal record hanging over their heads like swords. Their personalities too have taken a toll, changing inevitably under the harsh conditions of imprisonment, sometimes for the better, but most of the time for the worse. Where is equal treatment over here?
The next stop we made was in the courtroom. “In God We trust” – a striking phase a person sees when they enter the court. The emotions are ambiguous. Some may hope that God will help them and start praying at the moment they see this phrase. For others who do not believe in God, the sign seems to say: Abandon all hope yee who enter here. What is the purpose of this sign? Does it have the same purpose as the one on the banknote? If so, what is it? On one side in school we read that we live in a system where there is a separation of church and state and on the other hand we see this sign in our courtrooms all over the country. One cannot feel but a little suspect of truths told to us.
How does a picture look in the court? The three-fourth of those being charged during a day is low-income African Americans/Latino males. Is there any coincidence in it? The fact is that there are “more African Americans under correctional control today -- in prison or jail, on probation or parole - than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began” (Alexander, 2010, para.3). Another fact states that “as of 2004, more African American men were disenfranchised than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that explicitly deny the right to vote on the basis of race” (Alexander, 2010, para.4).Will anyone be able to prove that this criminal justice system is not racist? If not, then why such terrible discrepancy in figures?
Another episode that struck me in the court room is how little time is given to a person when they want to plea. Any guesses on how much time?... The right answer is that a person’s destiny is being decided in approximately thirty seconds. If you had an option - to fight the charges with a possibility of a loss and a severe punishment or to plead guilty for something that you have not done in return for less severe punishment– what would you choose? To make the picture more vivid - all of this is happening in a courtroom full of people the majority of whom you have never met in your life. That picture reminded of me a reality show. Sadly, it was real life.
All these situations described are happening on an everyday basis in the NDS. Not all of the NDS clients are criminals, though. They might have been at the wrong place in the wrong circumstances, or with no one who could support them at that time. One of the hilarious cases that the NDS deals with is a person charged with trespassing in their own building. The police officer’s comment on that was: “They looked suspicious to me.” And that is it. Is it enough to look suspicious to be arrested? And what is the definition of “suspicious?”
All of our clients are from low-income families. Two proverbs below explain the reason for many of the crimes committed:
“Hunger makes a thief of any man.”
Pearl S. Buck, quoted in You Said a Mouthful, edited by Ronald D. Fuchs
“Poverty is the mother of crime.”
Marcus Aurelius
How can we prevent crimes committed because of the lack of food or poverty? Are the existing social programs of any help?
There is a huge debate over legalizing marijuana. If it happens, 80 per cent of convicts will have to go free. What are the consequences? First of all, the unemployment rate will increase. How can the government support those who work in the correctional facilities? What could be done? If we have fewer criminals, what would police officers do?
We speak about some changes. However, no one wants to admit that those changes need time and effort. They will not happen in a year. Results could be seen in at least ten years. But no one wants to wait so long. We want a better life right here and right now.
I want to finish with a never-ending debate on who defines law. Who defines what a crime is? Who defines who a criminal is? Looking back in history, by law, slavery existed. By law, women could not vote. By law, legalized structural violence caused by billion dollar corporations was allowed. Things have changed. Now, all those laws are considered unjust. What has happened? Has society changed? In a few decades, those things that many criminals sit in prisons for now might become lawful. Is there any fairness?

A P.S. from Margaret diZerega

Margaret diZerega, who so kindly met with us at Vera a couple weeks ago, wrote the following in response to our conversation about family:

I appreciate the ways you are all thinking about your own families, ways families are incorporated into the work of the Vera spinoffs, and ways families are complex—they have strengths and challenges. There are no short answers and they key is to have a balanced approach where you can consider the strengths and challenges of families.

I thought you might be interested in learning more about ways to help people uncover their strengths. A colleague of mine named Michael Clark brings this approach to probation and parole departments all around the U.S. and even internationally. He has written about the benefits to a strength-based approach and we build on this work when training or providing technical assistance in criminal justice settings. For more on his work, you can visit: www.buildmotivation.com. If you look under the Resources Section and select “Youth and Families” there are some short articles about applying a strengths perspective to work with justice involved youth. I found it really shifted my thinking and ‘d be interested in what you think.

What Is Normal Anyway?

I feel like I live in a world where everything is backwards. The things that are truly damaging our existence are made to seem as though they are natural, and those that are effected by the larger forces of oppression are labeled deviants and their actions are necessarily punishable.

What is abnormal? Who decides what is normal and what is not? These are questions that my professor posed to us on the first day of my Anthropology and the abnormal class (she mad it clear that she is not a fan of the name of the course). We came to the conclusion that these labels are created by individuals from different cultures, through time, and that they are completely subjective. In American society there has been a system built that allows a small group of people to remain happy, wealthy, and healthy, while the rest of "us" remain under their supervision struggling to fight for the scraps that they so generously allow us to have.

Let me start by making some comparisons:

We have been conditioned to think that half naked women on billboards, pornography, and sexy music videos are acceptable, but a woman breast feeding her child is asked to leave a restaurant. We are made to believe that alcohol, prescription drugs, and tobacco are acceptable to use around children, but if I decided that cannabis was a healthier choice, I am considered a drug user and a criminal. We are tolorant of capital punishment and war, however a woman that kills her abusive spouse in self defense is deemed a violent murderer and sentenced to 25 years in prison. I walk by my block and admire a beautiful mural, but if a youngster happens to spray paint on the walls of a building he is arrested and detained and they call his artwork graffiti. We began building a wall between the US and Mexico specifically designed to keep immigrants out, but if their names happen to Melky Cabrera or Mariano Rivera, they can stay. We pollute our environment with garbage, toxic fumes, and oil spills, but if you spit on the ground you may likely get a summons. I could go on forever examining the hyppocracy of our government and how they have designed a system in which white collar crime is acceptable and normalized, and street crime is punishable to the fullest extent, but I am sure that you get the point. Do you think that my comparisons are too extreme, or are they bold and true?

The elites in our society have devised a very complex system in which they are able to remain in power, and by power I am referring to money, education, and respect. Although these elites are the minority, they have instilled humiliation, self hatred, and a lack of support in the majority, that have caused them to feel hopeless in their situation. To compensate for these bad feelings they self medicate by using drugs, acquiring "things", and reproducing hate. The image of limited good is being forced into our minds to make us believe that there are no resources for social programs, when in fact there are plenty of resources, but they remain in the bank accounts of the one's that are intentionally destroying our existence.

Professor Stein's phrase "nothing else to lose" is something that really resonated with me because I see this as an explanation as to why people that I know personally are unable to break their cycle of self destructive behavior. A young man that I have known my whole life told me that he has a flat screen television in his cell in prison. I was shocked! While there, he smokes cigarettes, listens to music, and hangs out with friends. When he comes home from prison, he is confined to a small bedroom in his mother's home listening to rap music, smoking cigarettes, watching movies, and hanging out with friends. He does the same thing as a free man as he does when he is incarcerated. I see that he is mentally imprisoned and I realize that he has nothing to lose, nothing to look forward to, no expectations from his family, because they in fact do many of the same things.

Professor Stein was on a roll because her question, "What is your problem in living today?" is another term that I will be using more often. Life is hard! It is hard for the homeless woman outside of John Jay College, and it may be hard for the Wall Street investment banker as well. When we start judging each other without understanding one another is when we make a huge mistake. I am learning in my social psych class that when WE fail at something we blame situational factors, this is called situational attribution. However when SOMEONE ELSE fails, we blame that person's individual characteristics, referred to as personal attributions, and this concept is known as Fundamental Attribution Error. These are things that we unconsciously believe and I am starting to wonder if there is really any hope of changing, or is there? Do you believe that these judgements are within our control, or are we controlled by human instinct?

As we discussed in class, when we try to explain these problems within our lives we would like to simplify them, however when we begin to deconstruct the issues, the causes and solutions only get more complicated. But this is how it SHOULD be. When we try to use merely psychological, sociological, or an anthropological perspective to explain the causes of a persons situation is when we are delaying the process of coming to a clear solution. Instead we must apply all of these perspectives and more, in order to fully understand the complexity of the issues because it is all of these factors that will determine a specific, effective solution.

I understand that when working with marginalized populations we are supposed to be careful not to entangle our personal lives with our professional identities, however I feel that this fine line is a tightrope walk for me. I understand that by revealing too much of myself may become an ethical issue, or that it may even set a different tone in my relationship with clients, however I feel that this is necessary. I want them to feel like I am just like them. I want them to know that I have been in challenging situations. I don't want them to feel as though there is this line that divides us because I do not feel that I can reach them that way. By leveling the playing field we can help each other. I want my experience of working with socially disenfranchised individuals to be a reciprocal relationship. The way that Professor Waterston deconstructed the word empowerment is amazing (my apologies Professor Stein). It shows how words can seem like they are being used in a positive way, but actually have covert implications. To think that I have the ability to empower someone would imply that I have this kind of supreme power that I am able to bestow on someone else, when in fact I feel that I have advice that I have gained through life experience that I would like to share with my participants to provide them with support, understanding, and motivation. How do you feel about this imaginary line that is placed between clients and staff? Do you feel that it should never be crossed, or is there a way to do so that will benefit both parties?

My goal is to educate people, not only how to better their own actions, but also to become aware of the forces that are causing their unhappiness. By gaining knowledge, people can no longer take advantage of us. We must remember that this label "minority" is false, because in actuality we are the majority and if we put our differences aside we can defeat the maltreatment that we have endured for so long. Take into account that when I say, "we" and "they" I am not referring to any specific race, or gender, but I am referring to those that do not control this oppressive structure, and that when I talk about fighting this oppression I still take into account that those one's who are the ultimate authority are people too, and I empathize with their struggle.