I urge myself today– take a calligraphy pen and write it again, as handsomely and lovingly as you can:  cultivate mindful empathy.

Though it’s difficult, particularly when feeling dispirited and abandoned by friends and family alike: remember to be aware of the troubles of others and not to minimize them.   Remember to be sensitive to what others are suffering, even when it may seem senseless to you.  Yesterday a friend, thinking of people who mistreated him decades ago, expressed understandable thoughts of revenge.   As one of the most remarkable people I’ve met, the late, great Fran MacDonald, often said, to great effect: “I understand.”  

Think about the power of that simple response:  I understand.  I hear you, I feel what you’re saying, I have digested the import to you.   On the other hand, it may have been Fran’s way of gently telling me to shut up whenever I complained, which was often.  

A talent for complaint, a genius for it, really, runs in my family.  It just comes naturally to some people.  “You’d complain if you were hung with a new rope,” my father observed to his only son more than once.

Just the other day, in the context of complaining about the many weaknesses of the so-called Affordable Care Act,  I compared our brilliant president’s many laudable speeches with his many less laudable actions, to the great annoyance of a friend who thinks Obama is a great man.  The president has spoken eloquently about the need for a transparent government while invoking the 1917 Espionage Act to intimidate leakers and maintaining an administration more opaque, less accessible to journalists and seekers of information under the Freedom of Information Act, than even the secretive Cheney’s administration was.  Net neutrality, equal access to all websites, at equal speed, is something the president has often correctly called a cornerstone of democracy.  He has pledged over and over to defend it, his ominous appointments to the board that will decide who can sell what at which internet speed and service notwithstanding.  His first official act as president was symbolically closing Guantanamo Bay prison, showing that his heart is in the right place; never mind the devilish details of the many uncharged prisoners, detained now for more than a decade, that we are force feeding there as they try to starve themselves to death.  A commitment to renewable energy, laudable, and new records for petro-fuel extraction quietly applauded by the oil companies.   Add the boom The Wall Street Journal crowed about: pumping thousands of gallons of secret, highly toxic chemical stews into the earth in order to extract trapped, and highly profitable, natural gas from deep inside the earth.  The worrisome Keystone pipeline that will transport tar sand sludge thousands of miles, from Koch Brother owned land in Canada to refineries in the American Gulf of Mexico that will extract gasoline from it, so far Obama has only approved the southern half of it for operation.    No reason, but past experience, to believe he will OK the crucial northern half of the pipeline.

By the way, I learned recently that the Koch Brothers’ father was a founding member of the John Birch Society, the outfit that contended then president Dwight D. Eisenhower was an agent of Communism.   The old reactionary is smiling in his grave at how skillfully his billionaire sons are advancing his old agenda.   Breeding will out, I suppose.

I say these critical things about our president sadly and fully realizing the virulent hatred this half-black man faces, the troubled, divided, ravished country he inherited and the additional pressure to accommodate that is placed on him, as a half-black man and our first “post-racial” president.

But I was talking about empathy a moment ago.  I can hear the haters, and I should pause to understand:  

Whoa, nothing “half” about it, dude.  We are stricter here than the good folks who made the Nuremberg Laws.  One half black equals black.  Shoot, a damn quadroon is black!  Same for an octoroon, damn it.   We American racists are strict, son, what the hell you talkin’ about “half-black”?   Did you bother taking a look at him lately?  The only half-black thing about him is his damn policies, and his embrace of virtually every policy G.W. Bush ever enacted, and that’s the only good half.  The indisputable fact is: the man’s still black.

Which puts me in mind of my friend, the fan of Obama’s, and his measured, reasonable sounding point about incrementalism.  With all the faults of Obamacare, he said, it’s a step in the right direction that was made against unprecedented, rabid opposition and something that no previous president had the courage or political will to do.  Leaving aside that it may in many ways favor the profits of private insurance companies over the needs of American medical patients, that it leaves millions of Americans without insurance, that it makes no sense compared to a public option, it is still a step, an incremental improvement over what came before.  Of course, he works for a corporation that provides his health insurance and so is not directly effected by it, but he’s read a great deal about the details and knows many things about the law that he’s sure even those suffering under it don’t know.

I gave him an example of incrementalism from history that caused him to crease his brow and agree to disagree.  After the Civil War the 14th Amendment guaranteed the rights of citizenship to all Americans, promising due process and equal protection of the laws [1].  It also granted Congress the power to pass any laws necessary to enforce its provisions against recalcitrant states, formerly in rebellion and forced by economic necessity to ratify the amendment as a condition for federal aid, that might be intent on violating these rights.  

Within a few years of the Amendment’s ratification, in the depths of a severe economic depression caused in large part by the war to preserve or abolish slavery, the Supreme Court clarified matters.  The privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States were spelled out explicitly by the wise and unappealable jurists of the nation’s high court:  the right to migrate freely from state to state, the right to freely use navigable interstate waterways and a third, equally important right of citizenship.  

The remaining privileges and immunities of American citizenship, the Court held, were the business of the States, and if the Ku Klux Klan itself ran the damned state, well, that was not the business of the federal government, unless, of course, the State was trying to abridge any of those three enumerated rights.  Case closed.  “Call me pisher,” as my grandfather used to say.

That remained the constitutional law of the land for more than 90 years, talk about incremental.  It remained so until some clever New York radical attorneys came up with a way to invoke the long slumbering century-old enforcement statute, never repealed,  to enforce the 14th Amendment, after the murders of civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman in June 1964,  down in the bowels of Mississippi.  Courageous southern judges on the federal bench ruled that the old statute could be used to bring such cases into federal court.  It has been used, literally millions of times, since, after a refreshing almost hundred year nap, to enforce the original intent of the 14th amendment. 

In that Mississippi trial, by the way, seven of the nineteen accused members of the lynch mob who murdered Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, after indictments against them were dismissed and the dismissal was overturned by the Supreme Court, eventually were convicted and sentenced to three to ten long years in prison [2].  The grinning sheriff was not convicted, though his deputy eventually served four years of his six year sentence.  Incrementalism, my man, something to be happy about — if you live to be 150 or so.

It is easy to be distracted, that’s for sure.  What is hard, and well worth doing, is cultivating mindful empathy.  It is at times very hard.  I suppose those are the times when it is most worth doing.  Today would be a good day for me to work on it.  It’s either that or jump out of my skin, leap onto my skeleton, already posed horse-like, and gallop off howling.

Come to think of it, that might be a better idea.

[1]  No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

[2]  On December 29 (1967), Judge Cox imposed sentences.  Roberts and Bowers got ten years, Posey and Price got six years, and the other three convicted defendants got four.  Cox said of his sentences, “They killed one nigger, one Jew, and a white man– I gave them all what I thought they deserved.”   source