On Empathy in 2021
As we enter the first month of 2021, I offer a short reflection on the vital importance of empathy.
2020 was been a year that shocked many privileged people, but for many marginalized folks, it did not. For us, living in relative privilege, it was a year that forced us to face death, disability, isolation, homelessness, financial insecurity, and lack of career prospects. Things that a mass majority of marginalized folks go have to deal with every day for a little bit over a while now. Memes by the plenty proclaimed 2020 a cursed year, waiting anxiously for 2021. I myself have indulged this sentiment once in a tweet, and by no mean am I insinuating that we should not joke at all about the chaos 2020 has wreaked. What I would like to impart is that we can’t simply joke around without doing the work necessary. All this joking gave rise to the self-soothing notion that the year 2020 was the only antagonistic force ravaging our well looked after sense of security and carefully guarded privilege. The consequence of this, as one might expect, is to call people’s attention away from the very urgent lessons that can be extracted from such a history-defining year. All of them can be condensed into a single phrase: have some fucking empathy.
Here, I must emphasize the following distinction; pity is not what I am calling for, pity is condescending while empathy is kindness. Though pity provides an interesting, fleeting glimpse into a persons' recognition of their position. I must also clarify that perhaps these musings can only be applied by people who can feel empathy. For some folks with sociopathic or psychopathic conditions empathy is an emotion not readily accessible to them. However, this article speaks to all those assumed to have the ability to access our sense of empathy.
I dare believe, admittedly optimistically, that if most people were to see the true face of capitalism -in all its exclusionary, violent, oppressive wholeness- there would be scarce few who would endeavour to defend and perpetuate it. At birth we are induced into a great ignorance about the true nature of capitalism and all the ugly -isms it collaborates with to prop itself up. Ignorance that is aided in its conception by the careful extrication of our inherent sense of empathy. The good news is, empathy can never truly be extracted (though for some people it does seem to have worked). We can gain it back, that sense of empathy that tugs our hearts, we can nurture and feed until it is healthy and strong again (the most popular scientifically-backed method of nurturing your sense of empathy is immersing yourself in books, which I personally recommend).
Those who staunchly support capitalism and benefit from its destructive offspring have taken the ability to empathize as synonymous with weakness and over-sensitivity (snowflake, I believe, is the word they use). This only offers more evidence of how powerful empathy is. It is an attestation to its ability to stand strong in the face of bigotry. This empathy, however, was put to the test in 2020. Our ability to listen to others who have a vastly different experience than us was put to the test, our ability to sacrifice some of our material freedom in order to save lives was put to the test, our ability to keep nursing important relationships from a distance was put to the test, our ability to educate ourselves on the struggles of others was put to the test. Many of us failed. And many people died as a consequence. If there is anything that we must learn from the pandemic is that virus or not, every time we indulge certain privileges, it often means that someone else is paying for it. If only we become more aware of the world around us, and start thinking about what consequences our actions may have, if we start listening rather than just hearing, 2021 could fare better.
We can’t just close our eyes and celebrate that is no longer 2020. 2020 is gone, but the destruction it has wrought is not. If we really want things to start looking up from here, we have to start putting in the work.
The energy of this notion of 2020 being a cursed year is similar to that of those in the US that fought hard to elect Biden to kick out Trump but have no interest holding him accountable as well. Biden’s campaign promised a return to ‘normal’ for the US political scene, which many liberals gladly gobbled up. That makes me sad. It makes me sad because I don’t want the US to go back to ‘normal’. The ‘normal’ the US enjoyed before allowed racism, misogyny, and imperialism (among others) to bleed marginalized folks dry. Similarly, people now want ‘2020’ to be over so things can get back to normal, but the ‘normal’ that we lived in before allowed employers to deny disabled folks permission and resources to work from home, it allowed us to give little thought to the safety of immunodeficient people and allowed us to abandon our elders and think of them as disposable bodies. Essential workers were scarcely considered essential and were certainly not given the due respect (and the labour conditions befitting such essential work). There are many things we have to learn from 2020, and some might even be too little too late, but do we not owe it to the world to try?
Perhaps I can only conclude this reflection asserting that empathy alone can’t cure the world of its evil systems (I am partial to a revolution for this purpose), but I do believe that this period in time can give us the opportunity to truly know Empathy and Solidarity. Only then do I think we can roll up our sleeves and go to work, not in bringing things ‘back to normal’, but reimagining, reinventing a more just and fair world.