31 May

Animals, Accidents, In Search Of Empathy. The Hypocrite’s Crime

by Jon Katz
Animals, Accidents
Animals, Accidents

Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another human being (or animal) is experiencing, to step in the shoes of another, to place oneself in the position of another.

Empathy is the most important emotion in my life, it is the key to true love, to compassion and friendship, and to creativity. Empathy is the teaching and hope of every great spiritual thinker, from Jesus to Abraham, to Mohammed to the Dalai Lama, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, Pope Francis.

Empathy lays bare the hypocrisy of people who claim to be of faith, but rush to condemn.

“It was not a second of inattention,” wrote Dominique on my Facebook page,  it was much worse. She knew, she had read about it on Facebook, “others tried to catch the kid while she was oblivious, and apparently dad was there too, so what were they doing? Texting, on smart phone, taking selfies?”
Dominique was one of many thousands of people in America who were gorging on righteousness, who seemed to know precisely who was responsible in that Cincinnati zoo enclosure.Even if they didn’t really understand what had happened, they knew who was to blame.
All day, we could see the digital rivers of hate and rage, the trickle of sympathy, the whispers of empathy. Like some dread sea monster, the mob had surfaced once more, gulping down all of the oxygen in the world.
 Dominique, like so many others, didn’t need to be there, talk to the mother or the zookeepers, stand in their shoes,  or know much beyond what she had seen on cable news. She was happy to be judge and jury, all in seconds, all with the clack of a few fingers on a keyboard.
it is so easy to judge, so difficult to feel. Just think of the political campaigns.
 It sometimes seems to me that are millions of judges and prosecutors on Facebook now, detectives and investigators, pathologists and snoops, voyeurs and gossips. I sometimes think we are becoming a nation of victims and Inquisitors, outrage addicts and raging furies, we all are drawn to judge, but dread being judged.
 I felt a stab through the heart when I read of the plight of the mother whose son slipped into a gorilla cage and shouted out to him that she was there, she was with him as it seemed he might be torn to pieces in that cage. I remember standing on a subway platform in New York City  years ago – it came to mind yesterday – with my four-year-old daughter on her first trip to the Museum of Natural History. It was her first ride on a subway train.
Could I even imagine her horror?

Behind me, a homeless woman began to shriek suddenly that she was dying and I turned my head to see who was making that piercing sound. It  seemed to me that it was seconds, but it might have been longer.
I heard a shout and when I turned back I saw my daughter walking straight for the edge of the train track, about to topple over. I raced over and grabbed her, asking myself what I possibly was thinking, tearing my heart out with the thought of what nearly happened and how guilty and responsible I would be and feel, how my life could have ended right there on that platform in so many ways. I was surely going to jump in after her if need be, and a train came roaring into the station seconds later.
I stood in that Cincinnati mother’s shoes, I wished I could have taken her in my arms and given her a big hug and thanked God her son got out of that cage and that she did not have to bear that burden for the rest of her life. It was clear that she was a good person, she worked with children, she brought her children to the zoo and in the blink of an eye, her life had nearly changed forever. Perhaps it has. No one asked me to judge her, I have no qualifications or right to judge her. I am not the police or a judge or jury. It is not my business to judge others, many people get paid to do it.
A computer is a tool, not a gavel. Apple and Microsoft don’t sell black robes. No one elected people on social media to sit in judgment of others.

Dominique and many others invoked God in their fury at the zoo and at the mother. I thought about the power of hypocrisy, a trait I have always hated more than any other, and that shines and burns on Facebook. I was nearly drowning in a sea of hypocrisy yesterday.
I was nose to nose with my old and great nemesis, hypocrisy, when people  who believe one thing say another.
The great moral philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote this of hypocrites: 
As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite’s crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil, but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Empathy is essential to loving animals.To understanding that my mother and father did the best they could for as long as they could.
To understanding that Fate may not be a working dog, but is a wonderful dog.
Empathy is at the core of my love for Maria, and hers for me, we stand in one another’s shoes every day and put ourselves in the position of another. If the animal rights activists in New York possessed the ability to empathize, they could have seen that so many of the carriage drivers loved their horses, and were hurt unnecessarily by the cruel taunts and insults suggesting they were subhuman animals and thieves beyond the moral community.
The hypocrite will stop at nothing to feel better about himself, no matter who he hurts, the empath knows what it feels like to hurt and does not inflict pain on others. The hypocrite can show no mercy, there is none inside of him.
And so, good people, this is the hypocrite’s crime. They claim they are being righteous, even loving, but in fact, they are mostly being vicious and hurtful. They are false unto themselves.
If the Vermont prosecutor who indicted Craig Mosher  (Hearing 3 p.m. June 6, Rutland Criminal Court. Hearing is open to the public) for the crime of involuntary manslaughter after a motorist was killed in a collision with his escaped bull possessed empathy, she would have understood that this man had done his best, for the animals, for his community. No one can do better than that. No one, I am told, felt the pain and helplessness of the accident more acutely than he did, or was more helpless to prevent it.
Is it not the ultimate hypocrisy to send him to jail for an act he could not possibly have avoided?
We can be true and false, or we can bear false witness against ourselves. If the police who raided Joshua’s farm two years ago possessed the gift of empathy, they would have seen how much they loved his horses, and how there was no justice in taking them away for no reason. They would have seen that he was nearly overwhelmed by a brutal winter and perhaps even offered to help.
But it was in the cruel and relentless assaults on the mother and keepers of the Cincinnati zoo that empathy seemed to be so hopelessly lost and I had to ask myself what kind of people are we becoming to threaten a mother with jail for suffering so dreadful an accident, rather than wrapping her in blankets, encouraging her not to tear herself apart, and thanking the people who may have saved her son from a horrible and painful death.
And what kind of freak am I, for feeling love and affection for her, and hope for her healing. She was the victim once, when her son was nearly killed by a powerful animal, and then again, when her own community of fellow humans turned on her like a nest of shrieking moneys swarming for food.
I got a message this morning from a Cincinnati zoo keeper thanking me for my writing.
“That helps mitigate the hate-filled opinions of the Internet mob,” she wrote.
“I know how horrible that whole situation was for the keepers,” she wrote.
“I blame no one, it was a terrible accident, but no one’s fault. Parents lose track of their kids all the time at the zoo, especially on a busy weekend like this was. Is it possible to breach the security at the front of an exhibit and gain access? Without determination and disregard for the signs, yes. If exhibits were 100 per cent inaccessible to visitors, they’d either be un-viewable or behind glass. Not the zoo’s fault. And as the true experts have pointed out, darting was not a viable option to shooting. Nobody’s fault.”
I say it was life’s fault. Life happens, as they say. Shit happens, as they say. It does, every day. My water went out this morning. Was someone to blame? Or did life happen to me as I slept?
For me, this message was needed, it was  a simple, clear statement from someone who works at the zoo and who knows what it is like to be there. Nobody’s fault. She would not last long in the media or politics.
Those with empathy understand that there were no heroes and no villains, as there were none when Craig Mosher’s bull was hit by a car out on the road.
Life had once again revealed its power over us, we are  none of us Gods, we cannot control fate or destiny, ours or others. Accepting this is a precious lesson in understanding life.
Empathy was hard-fought and hard-won for me, it did not come easily to me, I was too busy worrying about myself.  I am beginning to understand its radical power to change the world.
The hypocrite, rotten to the core,  running for office, posting on Facebook and Twitter, invokes faith but does  practice it or understand it: Luke 6:37: “Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will forgiven.”
We think of ourselves proudly as a Christian nation, whose values are under siege. Empathy was the core value of Jesus Christ, he worried every day about the poor and the sick, he walked in their shoes and felt their pain. Can any person of faith imagine him sitting in front of his computer screen blaming human beings for their suffering?
Empathy is the pathway to peace, the gateway to a spiritual life, the secret of compassion, the smotherer of hate and judgment. On days like this, I am inspired to elevate empathy to the level of faith. It is a practice, and when I start to judge another human being, I stop to think of that hot and muggy day long ago in New York City, when my daughter came within seconds and inches of plunging off of a platform and into the path of a train.
Judge not, that I will not be judged. Condemn not, that I will not be condemned. Forgive, and I shall be forgiven.
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