I know how I amwhen someone lectures on about wrongful arrests, limited freedoms, human rights abusesI know that its wrong, and that it shouldnt be that way, and perhaps some cursory feelings of empathy, but I cant make myself get angry. The more impassioned the person gets, the more I remain distant, unable to connect the life I live with these abstract words; sympathy tends to fail when the assumptions one needs to make in order to place oneself in the shoes of another are too demanding, too large of a gap from ones experiential reality. People tend to attack this dislocation with an anecdote (think politicians BS remarks about the conversations they just had with Jane Average in Anytown, USA about her husbands medical bills), but still it tends to be formulaic, and all too frequently continues. I think this is because invariably, the person speaking is him/herself removed, and the anecdote is not his/hers, and it is this second-handedness, this added distance from the events and suffering, that account for the inability to illicit sympathy.
I never thought about how frustrating it must be for these people: committed to a cause and charged with making that cause real for people like me, repeatedly facing disengagement. That being said, in sharing a situation in the world that I have encountered, and which needs to be known, I have thought a lot about getting past the above-mentioned hurdles. All I can do is attempt to relay the feelings and responses I felt to hearing such an anecdote first hand, in hopes of making the experience more real in its second telling (more…)