Greg Harton

Is empathy too much of a leap?

Years ago, a TV series, Quantum Leap, featured a physicist looking into time travel who got more than he bargained for. Rather than just bouncing around to different historical periods, the fictional Dr. Sam Beckett got a double whammy: He traveled through time and inhabited the body of someone who lived during that period.

During the show’s five-year run, each episode involved Beckett’s struggle to figure out the reason he’d transformed into a new person’s life. His quest was to correct some error in how things were supposed to be. In the process he had to quickly learn a lot about the person whose body he took over. After all, it might have been a onehour show, but after commercials, he only got about 45 minutes.

Essentially, every week the show demonstrated the proverbial lessons one might learn by walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.

Journalists spend their careers trying to understand what other people go through. It’s a vital component to telling their stories. Naturally, we fall short, but through interviews and other reporting, some of the stories we tell are designed to give readers at least a taste of other people’s lives.

Years ago, a colleague suggested I couldn’t understand what she was going through. The suggestion irked me, because it seemed she was questioning my very capacity for empathy. After more discussion, she made it clear she applied the analysis quite broadly: Nobody can understand another person’s experience, she suggested.

I didn’t buy it. It sells empathy short.

Another part of that discussion frustrated me. It seemed my colleague felt the demographic group I fell into — a white, middle-class male — particularly reflected a lack of capacity to understand the challenges facing others. If that was true, I suggested, she faced the same limitations in understanding me. Everyone does.

I’m a big listener of The Dave Ramsey Show podcast. Last week, I listened as a 23-year-old man from Florida called in. As he described it, his father had abandoned his mom. The son had worked his mom out of debt and was busy trying to get his own debt under control. The problem was three car loans.

Two of them, totaling somewhere around $50,000, were on cars his father used in his business but for which the son had cosigned. The father wouldn’t give them up.

The young man on Ramsey’s show was in tears. His own father would not cooperate to undo a situation that burdened his son. He was content taking advantage of the young man and did not concern himself with the fact he was wrecking his son’s emotional and financial future.

My father has been nothing but supportive of me my entire life — not financially after I became an adult, but certainly through just being there willing if the need arises. So I haven’t faced the same circumstance as the man from the Ramsey show, but I was heartbroken nonetheless that a father could do that to his son.

The episode reminded me of that years-ago conversation and my continuing hope that we can understand what our fellow humans are going through, at least enough to make a difference. My colleague’s view seemed, and seems, too cynical. Because if we can’t experience empathy, it means it’s pointless to even try.

In this crazy world we live in, it seems we ought to devote some serious energy to trying. We’re all humans situated on a relatively tiny planet in the universe.

If we can’t find the commonality of our existence and instead concentrate on our differences only, we all are in serious trouble.