Empathy for me, but not thee
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- February 2, 2025
- 825
I want quiet womb-like rooms to sit in instead of the anticipatory terror of the news that greets me when I reach for my phone each morning. There’s no putting it down because all that does is delay what I already know, have known — knew even when most said, “You’re overreacting.”
I am not an over-reactor. I am calm and steady, with a slice of anxiety I’ve learned to tamp down. I don’t journal but do have hundreds of notes in my phone, snippets of sentences and quotes from people I don’t want to forget. Oftentimes, I might be in the middle of a convo and say, “Keep talking. I need to write something down.”
As of this morning, I have 330 notes in my app filled with bits and pieces. This morning I started one titled “2025.” I will be keeping track of more than I wanted to there. I need to remember it all.
Michelle Maiese, the chair of the philosophy department at Emmanuel College, said, “Dehumanization is the psychological process of demonizing the enemy, making them seem less human and hence not worthy of humane treatment. Dehumanizing often starts with creating an enemy image. As we take sides, lose trust, and get angrier and angrier, we not only solidify an idea of our enemy, but also start to lose our ability to listen, communicate and practice a modicum of empathy.”
I never want to lose my ability to communicate, nor do I want to lose empathy for another human being. Last week a post went viral that said we “should not commit the sin of empathy.” And let me tell you, if we’re not able to empathize with another person’s suffering and fear (or value words we’ve been taught in the pew since childhood), we’ve lost the thread of humanity. We’ve begun dehumanizing.
I’ve been trying to look outside the past week to see what I can do. There seems to be no plan to further the public good, just a dismantling of every system that kept society running as a whole. There was always room for improvement, a new program or law here and there.
But this dismantling, it’s not going to end how people believe it will.
I won’t stay silent because silence is complicity. I won’t hammer anyone over the head with this every week, but I will be a witness to what’s happening. Next week I’ll write about food or Valentine’s Day, but with an ear to a knock at the door, to what in one week has changed me and mine five ways over.
I have had to resign myself long ago that many want systemic racism to remain. They want DEI to disappear. They want to be colorblind. Already, it’s being disassembled and will affect more than just people of color. It will affect women, the disabled, the poor, people who are ill and immigrants from a kaleidoscope of nations. It’s touching Native Americans, U.S. citizens and people in the military. It’s going to touch anyone reading this.
This land is your land; this land is my land. We have a land where I believed everyone could be who they want. It’s what I told my kids when they left home. It’s what my husband believed. A land where we could worship or not worship how we wanted. On its way lies a narrow and violent existence that is unwelcoming in shape and rooted in extremes. Just as we see extremism in other countries, we must be able to identify it here and root it out.
“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart; men, women, children are separated. Children come home from school to find their parents have disappeared.”
—Anne Frank, “The Diary of Anne Frank”