Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/category/culture/empathy-culture/page/35/)
I would like to declare July 22nd a feast day to celebrate our incarnation on this earth, something all of us alive and who have ever lived share with all life and life to come. We are made of the same substance; we are subject to the same joys and sufferings of the flesh.
Edwin Rutsch is videotaping all kinds of people in political hotspots and asking them for their views about and experience of empathy. Today he is at a pro-Johannes Mehserle demonstration in Walnut Creek, an outlying Bay Area suburb. Mehserle is the San Francisco Bay Area transit policeman who killed an innocent, unarmed traveler in full view of dozens of people last year, and who was just convicted of involuntary manslaughter. After the verdict was announced on July 8 a great deal of anger was expressed on the streets of Oakland at the insufficiency of the verdict, and Edwin was there taping as well (he recommends #s 27, 29 and 34 to our readers): here is # 27, his brief interview with our own Nichola Torbett:
In this video Niochola deftly brings together two strands of nonviolent work that can seem to be working at odds with each other. Here she is talking about empathy for the police, while linking arms with fellow protesters against efforts by the police to minimize and disperse their collective energy.
How would you react if you saw a sign like the one in this image on a bus you were about to board, but change a few words. “Facing Ex-Communication? Eternal damnation for your soul? Is your minister threatening you? Leaving Christianity?”
In 2008, Julio Diaz retrieved his wallet from a mugger by taking the man to lunch. Meanwhile, a cat in the Amazon rainforest lures its prey by crying like a baby monkey. Coincidence? Julio Diaz is a New York social worker. He gets off the subway every evening at six and eats at the same restaurant.
The difference between “mama grizzlies” and human females in particular and humanity in general is the capacity for rational thought. it is the moral responsibility that comes with that capacity. Unlike the mama grizzly, we are not only responsible to and for our own personal offspring. We are responsible to defend all the children of all the communities, towns, cities, nations and world. We are responsible for both human and nonhuman offspring.
Marrying a foreigner and living in their country — as both my brother and I have done (we’re English but I live in Switzerland and my brother in the States) — can be a challenge: not just to fit in but to work out when to contribute by not exactly fitting in. My own experience leaves me doubly impressed by my old friend Rob Corcoran, a Scot and a white man, who married an American and went to live in Richmond, the former capital of the Southern states. When they arrived there, they moved into a mixed race neighbourhood, and quickly a couple of African-American neighbours became good friends. As an outsider perhaps my friend was better placed to see old problems with fresh eyes. Out of their experience grew a programme called Hope in the Cities.
In a few days, possibly as early as tomorrow, a controversial trial will come to an end, and the verdict on Johannes Mehserle, the police officer who killed Oscar Grant in Oakland, California, last January, will be released. This is a tense moment in Oakland. What will happen if he is acquitted? What will happen if is found guilty? Whatever the verdict is, some people will be unhappy.
Beautiful article in our local paper about Dean Ornish (at right with his family), “the nation’s pre-eminent proponent of adopting a healthy life to reverse chronic diseases.” Since founding the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in 1984, he has run trial after trial looking at whether lifestyle choices involving diet, exercise, meditation – and even love – can be as powerful in treating disease as drugs, radiation, chemotherapy and surgery. “In my 33 years, in everything we did, people thought we were crazy,” said Ornish, a self-described hugger who exudes a doctor’s natural air of concern. “People said the tests must be wrong or that this could only happen in California. But we have proven that lifestyle is treatment, not just prevention.”
Joy is not a betrayal of sorrow for a suffering world; it is companion and counterpart.
Tariq Ramadan is one of the most visible Muslims in Europe. Charismatic, loved, hated, feared. A source of inspiration for many young European Muslims, a reference; suspected and accused of double talk by many non-Muslims.
I consider him a friend; I wrote a review for Tikkun, defending him against Caroline Fourest’s book attacking him. At a conference that I helped to organize, Ramadan was coming to speak. There were also two Muslim imam friends present, and I asked each in private what they honestly thought of him.