Each year since the election, this first principal has gotten harder and harder to imagine. In fact, my lifelong faith in the power of truth and love and their power to tear down barriers between us has been deeply shaken by what I see and hear among my peers.
Of course what I see and hear is not really by direct experience, but more from the carefully filtered reports various media provide me. These filters, which limit and direct my focus and attention, are created by my friends, by black box algorithms, by professional editors and influences, no to mention crazy serendipity. The view I get through them is dark and dire, hate and fear seem to reign, and they shake my windows and rattle my walls. But indeed, don’t speak too soon, there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’. Let’s dig down to the vast array of features that join us before we sling the hate back at them.
Perspective is a bitch. I just had a big messy rip in my arm stitched up by an ER physician. It was a jagged and dirty wound, and as he worked he recalled another sewing job he had had, one of the victim of a dog attack. He told me it took him 4 and a half hours to close all her wounds, long after this shift was to end. I replied how interesting it was that so many of us so love dogs despite their killer instincts. He said his wife wanted to get a dog, but then said, “I will NOT have a dog in my house” with a fear and anger that surprised me.
But it was his perspective of that poor woman he had labored so hard over: her pain, his sadness in her disfigurement, and his fear of ever seeing such a horror again, that had brought him, understandably, to that place of hate and anger. As a dog lover, from my perspective of the great love and comfort many dogs have brought into my life, how effective would it have been, to attack his anti-dog position and defend them as sweet and cuddly companions?
Pitting the gaping bloody wounds of his dog experience against the soft warm kisses and bellies of mine would be pointless. Only by trying to find empathy for each other’s experience, to understand how they might arrive where they obviously have, can we lower the walls and bridge the gaps.
So let’s try to find some unity in this: the universal reaction of our kind to the horror and beauty we each discover based on our unique histories and experience. Had I sat, blurry eyed after an 18-hour shift, to try and reconstruct the ravaged body of a beautiful young woman, my love may surely have turned to hate, just as that physicians had. He and I, however distinct our preferences, do share the same cognitive structures that give us the awesome ability to process our experiences and arrive at attitudes aimed to protect us in the future from whatever fates may have befallen us.
HOLLY DAYS 