Week after week, I stare slack-jawed at articles and video reports detailing the suffering of people within and outside of the United States’ borders. I struggle to determine what surprises me more: the physical and mental anguish these people face or the callous comments of those who cheer at others’ misfortune.
For one reason or another, many have decided that people who fall under whatever demographic they despise deserve to live under conditions that would break their hearts if they saw their parent, sibling or child undergo the same trials. But when neither they nor their loved ones are affected, many people check their compassion at the proverbial door.
This apathy toward fellow human beings is something I cannot understand.
When I was 6 years old, I put a tape into our VCR and watched “Pokémon: The First Movie – Mewtwo Strikes Back” for the first time. In the film, a series of Pokémon (living creatures that are central to the franchise) are cloned and forced to fight their traditionally birthed counterparts. The human characters look on in horror as the Pokémon battle one another to the point of exhaustion before the main character sacrifices himself to end the fighting. Only then do the cloned and non-cloned Pokémon settle their differences and learn to co-exist.
The leader of the clones, Mewtwo, comes to the following conclusion: “I see now that the circumstances of one’s birth are irrelevant. It is what you do with the gift of life that determines who you are.”
Let’s break this quote down into its two parts as they apply to humanity. Firstly, whether we are born rich or poor, Black or white, cis or trans, citizen or immigrant does not matter. Or at least, those distinctions shouldn’t matter—because in the end, we are all human. Nevertheless, time after time, we hear the loud, ignorant voices of people who want to elevate themselves by deciding that an opposing demographic is somehow “lesser.” To speak on the second sentence, if you choose to spend your life tearing down and gaining satisfaction in the distress of others—no matter how you try to justify it—you have determined who you are, and I pity you.
Even if you believe in the United States’ authority to deport illegal immigrants or to revoke the visas of legal residents, why must you be so accepting of people being “disappeared” off the streets without warning—without the chance to tell their families that they are safe? Why are you OK with people being crammed into overcrowded ICE detention centers and foreign prisons with inadequate food and sanitation? These people are human. Why do you celebrate when they are treated as being less than human?
Life is not a sports game. You aren’t “winning” by supporting actions of this nature. If anything, when one person is treated disproportionately to their alleged “crime,” then all of humanity loses. Maybe you think I sound dramatic or naive. But I don’t believe that empathy is wrong. I don’t believe that we should become desensitized to suffering. And I certainly know that the church I grew up in preached that we should love all, without exception—even if many of the people I know who sat in those pews alongside me are among those who are delighted by the same events I view as travesties.
In the same animated film, another character says, “We do have a lot in common: the same earth, the same air, the same sky. Maybe if we started looking at what’s the same instead of always looking at what’s different … well, who knows.”
Forget whether a person is an American citizen or not, or whether they share your racial or ethnic background. If you can imagine someone you love experiencing the circumstances that many in the news are facing right now and you would feel sad for them, direct that sympathy toward those who are, in fact, dealing with those circumstances.
You don’t need a personal stake in the race to practice empathy on a regular basis. We are a global civilization. No matter our petty differences, we are the same, and we should believe in a baseline of mutual respect and human decency.
This MFP Voices opinion essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.
