Some Empathy Talk

This blog is about our family's attempt to send a letter to President Trump every day of his presidency that has mail delivery.  Since family is kind of an open term, on Wednesdays we will feature guest writers who are sort of a part of our extended family.  This letter is from our friend Tony.

 

 

President Trump

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Washington D.C.  20500

21 January 2017

 

President Trump:

 

Scanning the headlines on the morning after your inauguration, I made a Freudian slip: In place of your proclamation that “the time for empty talk is over,” I read “the time for empathy talk is over.” For a split second I thought you were dismissing President Obama’s repeated calls for greater empathy during his presidency--but of course you meant to dismiss all of his words and actions over the past eight years as “empty talk.” And yet your inaugural address also contained the seeds of a powerful form of empathy that I hope will mark your own words and actions as president.

 

I may have misread that headline because I’ve been talking about empathy a lot lately with the students in my community college English classes. We’ve watched Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk on “The Danger of a Single Story,” for example, which challenges all of us to move beyond shallow or stereotypical views of others by listening to--and really hearing--their individual and collective stories. We’ve been reminded by Roman Krznaric that empathy is not “a nice, soft, fluffy concept” but something “fiery and dangerous,” not merely an individual emotion but a vehicle for social change.

 

Some may hear in your proposals a repudiation of empathy, at least of the sort of empathy that progressives enact when they embrace equal rights for women or fight for LGBT Americans or proclaim that black lives matter as much as any other lives. Many Americans--so many of us--are deeply worried about your plans for America.  And the words of your inaugural address did not calm those concerns: in fact, when you assured us that “There should be no fear,” some of us felt only more fear; and when you promised that “Now arrives the hour of action,” some of us could hear only a threat.

 

But your speech also promised that you will work for all of us, that your “oath of office” was “an oath of allegiance to all Americans,” and that pledge was grounded in an appeal to empathy. You described the struggles not only of unemployed factory workers but also of children “born in the urban sprawl of Detroit,” and then proclaimed that “their pain was our pain”: the very definition of empathy.

 

My hope, though, is that you will ground your actions as president not in a “nice, soft, fluffy” version of empathy, the kind that says “I feel your pain” without first saying “let me hear your story.” I’m hoping instead that you embrace a much more radical, challenging, fierce kind of empathy, grounded in the recognition that there are as many American stories as there are Americans, and that listening to only some of those stories inevitably skews any understanding of “we the people.” If you mean what you say about representing all Americans, I hope you will commit to listening carefully to a lot more stories. As Chimamanda Adichie concludes her brilliant talk, “Stories matter. Many stories matter.”

 

Where can you find those stories? Some of them you will need to actively seek out, to be sure; others, though, will come right to your door, in the form of thousands of letters from American citizens. My final plea is simple: That you will direct the interns or staffers reading through all of those letters to pass on some of the most challenging ones to you each week along with some of the most supportive. Listening to even a few of these voices each week may be the very best way for you to insure that, as you promised, “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer.”

 

Sincerely,

Tony VanderArk