WALKING IN THE SHOES OF OTHERS
Empathy from the Great Depression rang out for years. Now, it appears to have ended.
Excerpted from “What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism” by Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner. © 2017 by Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner. Reprinted by permission of Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. All rights reserved.
Iam not sure if the word empathy was in either of my parents’ vocabularies. It wasn’t the kind of word one heard growing up in my neighborhood in Houston. But my parents taught me about the importance of empathy through their words and deeds. And they made it clear that it was part of the glue that held together our family, our neighborhood, our community, and the United States itself.
My earliest memories are of times of despair and the Great Depression. Our family home was on Prince Street, on the extreme outer edge of what was the Houston of the 1930s. It was more of a big town back then, not yet really a city. We lived in the Heights, which today is hip and gentrified, but back then our street was just a lightly graveled road. It was considered a rough, tough neighborhood, and there was only one street — a dirt street — between our house and the open country.
Our house was nothing to brag about, but at least it had four sturdy walls, with two bedrooms, a small living room, a small kitchen and one bath. Across our street was a poor frame house in a state of semicollapse. A half-block down lived a family who didn’t even have a house, just a corrugated tin roof held up by four posts in the corners and one in the middle. Their floor was dirt.
Nobody in either of these families had a job. That was not unusual in our neighborhood during the Depression. And the families that were lucky enough to have work usually had only meager part-time jobs. A full-time job like the one my father had working the oil fields was rare and considered a blessing, no matter the pay, the hours, or the amount of backbreaking labor it entailed. This was what the United States was like not that long ago: a country where families struggled to live on dirt streets, with dirt floors and little or no income to pay the bills.
The father of the family in the dilapidated house had lost a leg. Exactly how he’d lost it was unclear, but the prevailing belief was that it had happened after a misjudged leap from a boxcar. His condition brought a crushing change to his fortune and that of his family. Before the accident, the father had been a day laborer for hire, a man with a shovel who could dig you a ditch. But there wasn’t much demand for a one-legged ditch digger. He, his wife and their four or
five children had no money. Zero. They eventually applied for some form of relief, but it came only sporadically.
The family under the tin roof had a passel of kids as well, maybe as many as six. I remember thinking how elderly the father was, although he was probably much younger than he looked. A hard life will do that to a person.
The neighborhood tried as best it could to help these families stay alive. If we had leftovers after supper, we would walk them across the street. You might think that these families were humiliated by the offerings, but there is no dignity in being hungry. And there was no judgment or disdain on the part of those offering assistance. No one wondered why those neighbors weren’t working, and no one passed moral judgments on their inability to fend for themselves.
On Christmas Eve, my father and uncle pooled their money, meager though it was, and bought toys for the families living in the dilapidated house and under the tin roof. I remember a rag doll, a small wooden train, and for some reason a tambourine. We waited until after the children had gone to bed to give the gifts quietly to the parents, so that when those children woke up the next morning they would not think Santa had forsaken them.
What sticks with me more than even that act of kindness was how my mother talked to me about it. I asked my mother why we gave those families gifts at Christmas when we ourselves didn’t have much. I remember then answering for myself: “It was because we felt sorry for them, right?”
“We do not feel sorry for them,” my mother said sternly. “We understand how they feel.” It was a lesson that is so seared in my mind, I can see her face and I can hear her tone of voice as if it were yesterday.
It is perhaps not surprising that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan looked at a nation so traumatized and felt they could defeat us. Of course history turned out differently. The same generation that had been driven to such depths in the 1930s rose up to push back the forces of totalitarianism in a two-ocean global war in the 1940s. Perhaps those authoritarians, who felt no empathy for their own people or those they conquered, underestimated the strength of our empathy. Empathy builds community. Communities strengthen a country and its resolve and will to fight back.
I remember a great push to organize for civil defense, as there was great fear of a German or Japanese invasion. Almost everyone, truly everyone, regardless of age, race, or economic status, rushed to come together and help as soon as the word came out. Our neighborhood wasn’t known for organization, but this need galvanized even those you would have never expected to volunteer. It must be noted, of course, that we were still a segregated nation. But the war effort, including the service of African American soldiers, helped change the country in that regard as well. In 1948, President Harry Truman would desegregate the armed forces, six years before Brown v. the Board of Education ended segregation in our public schools.
When I consider the forces that have led to our greatest moments of progress, I do not think it is a surprise that a great spasm of empathetic legislation came in the midst of the Great Depression. The beginning of Social Security is the most notable example, but there were a host of other programs that aimed to bring relief and the dignity of work to a populace in desperate need.
I worry that our nation today suffers from a deficit of empathy, and this is especially true of many in positions of national leadership. It is a phenomenon that is born from, and that exacerbates, the broader divisions tearing at our republic. We see a rising tribalism along cultural, ethnic, economic class and geographic lines. The responsibility for these divisions should fall more squarely on the shoulders of the powerful, those who need to be empathetic, than on those who need our empathy. When we live in a self-selected bubble of friends, neighbors, and colleagues, it is too easy to forget how important it is to try to walk in the shoes of others.
One often finds the greatest lack of empathy in those who were born lucky. They tend to misidentify that luck as the superiority of their character. What would their message be if they themselves had been born under far different circumstances? These people are in dire need of humility, a humility bathed in the refreshing waters of empathy. We can all afford to drink more from that spring as well.
“We do not feel sorry for them,” my mother said sternly. “We understand how they feel.”