I’ve always found suffering difficult. I write not of myself but of others. From a child, I’ve been for the underdog. In America, in spite of its E pluribus unum imprint on our currency and a bloody civil war to end slavery, racism still lingers.
I remember being appalled as an eleven year old, gazing out of a train window as we sped toward Miami, the shacks, the impoverished black sharecroppers laboring in the South Carolina and Georgia cotton fields.
The South was still racially segregated, the legacy of post reconstruction days, later engrained by the United States Supreme Court in 1896.
Separate schools, separate accommodations, separate seating.
I was attending sixth grade in Coral Gables, Florida. All of us were white. Going and coming, I’d catch transportation at a bus terminal. Water fountains there were designated Whites Only, Colored Only.
I chose to drink from the fountain for the Colored.
A white man took me aside, directed me to the fountain for Whites. I rebelled.
I don’t know where this empathy came from. My urban family was racist. Our neighbors likewise.
My first encounters with blacks was in the military. In basic, my upper bunk mate was black. I had a close black buddy. Sadly, I lost him in an on base accident.
I’m still learning to listen to the grievances of my black brothers and sisters.
But back to the empathy element.
Driving home from my barber this morning, I saw this bedraggled man along the shoulder, pushing a cart, presumingly filled with his possessions, and accompanied by a dog.
How many thousands like him? And this in America.
Lately, I’ve been reading a biography of the eminent American psychologist and philosopher, William James. For years I kept a copy of his The Varieties of Religious Experience on my nightstand. I hadn’t known of his first love, Minnie Temple, a kindred spirit, intellectually his equal, a vivid conversationalist with strong opinions and inveterate rebel, eager for life, but doomed by tuberculosis, like Keats, at age 25.
In her last letter to William, which he kept all his life behind a photograph of her at 16, her hair cut short in an act of social defiance, she wrote:
“The more I live the more I feel that there must be some comfort somewhere for the mass of people, suffering and sad, outside of that which Stoicism gives—a thousand times when I see a poor person in trouble, it almost breaks my heart that I can’t say something to comfort them. It is on the tip of my tongue to say it and I can’t—for I have always felt myself the unutterable sadness and mystery that envelop us all—.”
This is how I feel each day.
This is how I felt when I saw that man this morning with his canine friend. Where will he sleep tonight, find food?
I think often of the homeless,
the warehoused forgotten in nursing homes,
the millions, lonely and estranged,
those terminally ill, often in pain,
the daily dying in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza.
Even though it often yields no solace, I’m unwilling to wish empathy away.
–rj
Brimmings: up from the well 