At each of our civic association and super neighborhood meetings, the library comes with free books to give away. I asked about it because — yes?? I want free books! They said they’ve been getting donations, and sometimes they have so many that they just give them out. The librarian we see most regularly knows I’m going to take all the leftovers home after everyone else has picked through them, so she brings me extra.
One of those books was A Purposeful Warrior by Jocelyn Benson, and I’ve been reading it. It’s about her time as Michigan’s secretary of state, when the president went after her for maintaining voter integrity. I’m not done yet, but something in it resonated with me, and I’ve been sitting with it for a few days.
She was writing about political rhetoric, but more than that, about what happens when our highest officials take part in it, the cascade effect it has on regular folks. Then she moved into a subject I felt so hard: the lack of empathy for others, and the apathy about how we’re all connected.
I see it all the time in civic work. People don’t vote because they didn’t like one thing someone did, and that one thing paints the whole picture. Or they put their own needs first without considering the impact around them.
A simple example is speeding down a street. You might gain a few seconds. But if you hit a pedestrian going 40 mph, you’re likely to kill them. Is that risk worth the few seconds?
Another example: we have a resident growing sunflowers in the public right-of-way, and they block other residents from seeing whether a car is coming before it pulls into the intersection. She’s been asked numerous times to cut just those specific flowers; she can keep the rest, and she keeps growing them on that corner anyway. Worse, she’s a planning engineer, so she knows exactly what it means to plant in a public right-of-way. Every year, same spot. All for what? She has sunflowers all across her lot. Maybe she harvests the seeds, and I think that’s great; nobody cares about some overgrown flowers. But if they’re causing a problem in one specific place, why keep doing it?
You can see the same lack of empathy in social media comments. It makes me sick sometimes, reading how horribly humans treat each other. I guess it’s easy to cast stones when you’re anonymous, but on the other side of it is another human being.
Last night I was talking to a resident, checking in on her. She’s a known matriarch of the community. I asked how she was doing after the shooting death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. She was depressed; I could see the tears in her eyes, and she still reminded me that we need to approach our neighbors with so much love, compassion, grace, and empathy. We aren’t getting it from our federal leaders, but we can give it to each other.
I liked that message.
Leave a comment