Empathy
I'm a software developer from the early 1980s - a stereotypical asocial type, not very empathetic, not very well able to understand the world from the perspective of another.
In 2015 an old friend boiled up on social media, aroused by the prospect of Syrian refugees coming to the United States. "Will you fight? I'll fight!" he announced to everyone.
He wasn't alone. Many in the U.S. saw the refugees as terrorists, because of 9/11, Afghanistan, etc., and as cowards, because they were fleeing. "I would stay and defend my home!"
The news at the time carried images of apartment buildings gutted and flattened. What was there to defend? Friends and families lay crushed beneath collapsed concrete or pulped by shrapnel. Who was left to protect?
It was noted even then that climate events had helped trigger the Syrian civil war. A severe drought had killed livestock, raised food prices, made farmers flee from their fields to the cities. The civil war, triggered in part by their government's inability to relieve suffering, had made Syrians of all kinds flee for their lives.
By 2015 I'd traveled a bit. At times I'd lived, very briefly, without heat and running water. That mild experience gave a weak sense of what the world must be like for those refugees. No heat, no water. No food. No shelter from the elements. No place to relieve oneself. No clean clothing - nothing clean.
Try to stop after each of those items. Imagine what your life would be like without that one thing.
I'm lucky: life gave me experiences to compensate a little for my lack of empathy.
This morning the news describes the destruction in California.
Shirley Hertel returned to her Thousand Oaks home Friday morning after watching it catch fire on TV just hours before.
The sight left her in tears....
“I don’t even know that I even understand what happened here,” [said Shirley Hertel, a Thousand Oaks resident].
She took the fire — and the water damage she had just fixed in the home last month — as a sign that she should leave the city she’s lived in her whole life, she said. Her other daughters and granddaughter live in Kentucky, she said, and she wants to watch her grow up.
“This will always be my home, but Kentucky is where I’ll live,” she said.
Her home has been destroyed. There is nothing left for her to defend in Thousand Oaks. She is fleeing California for Kentucky.
At least she doesn't need to worry whether Kentucky will let her in.
U.S. citizens are now among the planet's refugees. Will this concrete experience bring us a little empathy?
The Oakies were also climate refugees. But the dust bowl was a long time ago. It can no longer give us empathy through experience.
What can bring us empathy is just as likely, in this case, to bring us a Malthusian mess, with less food, water and livable earth divided among more people.
