This remarkable video captures the scene at an unusual demonstration: one where the police make no attempt to separate the two sides. Those defending a convicted policeman’s reputation and those attacking the system as racist are vehemently opposed to each other. Without police lines between them, people engage at close quarters, shout insults and even talk and answer each other’s points, nose to nose. It looks like the police should stand back at more demos, and let this happen. People want to speak at and to each other and some even listen.

What makes it even more remarkable is that the videographer has an agenda: he asks everyone what they think about empathy. No surprise, we find that some people have no empathy for any policeman who shoots and kills a defenseless man in the back while he has him entirely under his control — [the dead man is] the father of a young girl, no less — while other people, notably a young woman whose father, a policeman, was killed on active duty, have no empathy for “those people over there” who would rob stores and act violently. Everyone, however, wants to be empathized with.

And some people do want to talk with the other side. A white policewoman says she will go talk with anyone. An African American woman says white people are overly afraid of her people and she invites them to come to West Oakland, a low income black neighborhood, for tea.

This is not the oppressed engaging with the elite, with CEOs and their bought pols in DC. This is working and middle class Americans on two sides of a divide arguing with each other, wanting desperately to be heard, to be understood. Some want to hear and to understand. This is Edwin Rutsch’s best shot yet to capture an early stage in what he calls Building A Culture of Empathy.