Wanted: Empathy Seeds 🌱🌻🪴

Too many violent movies have dulled or obliterated the character trait that humans need to practice charity and concern for others’ suffering. Empathy.

Photo by Mei-Ling Mirow on Unsplash

Empathy allows us to step into another’s shoes and walk his walk, to feel as we are experiencing the ups and downs of his life, to see as he sees. It’s a quality lacking as we stay alone in our small insulated family or group of friends. We become hardened to anyone but ourselves and our difficulties. We no no time for anyone but ourselves. We become critics, haters, bigots, or worse.

Why have I noted movies instead of social media? Before we had heard of social media, we have always had war, mystery, crime, and adventure movies where rapes, murders, slashings, mutilations, bombs graphically depicted. Halloween fake blood fun movies seemed fine.

Balanced (sane) viewers watch violence, but they have empathy with the victims—not the perpetrators. Disturbed individuals watch and identify with the villains, the murderers, the rapists, and seeds of destruction are planted in psychopaths’ brains.

So. Empathy begins at home the way parents read to their children, the verbal expressions of parents during television viewing. No young child decides to do violence by himself. He absorbs the violent (or kind) attitudes around him when parents are talking. He feels their anger and their disgust—and later adds it to his violent repertoire.

How can nice people watch violence and never condone it or want to be violent? It’s a mystery. Look around at all you see today, and ask yourself how our society has become immune to witnessing such violence. Is it just violence overload or have parents planted too many bad seeds without thinking what will grow and fester?

Dear parents and teachers: plant empathy seeds and water them daily. You can make a real difference one child at a time, one school at a time, one community at a time. Plant empathy!