Kindness and Empathy, Changes We Can Believe In!
As the midterm returns come in, I see signs that Americans are asking anew what we owe one another. After two and a half centuries of our democratic experiment, many have wondered whether ordinary people can still have a meaningful say in how they are governed. The early results give me reason to believe that many Americans still insist on having that say. What gives me hope is the possibility that we are also reconsidering what we want our government to care about.
I read the early Democratic gains as a challenge to the outsized influence of corporations and billionaires and to a style of governing that concentrates power in too few hands. I also hear a moral question in these returns. Whose hardship do we take seriously enough to act on? Empathy asks us to consider what another person is living through. Kindness asks us to let that understanding shape what we do, including how we vote, what we fund, and how we hold leaders accountable.
For Black Americans, the question of whose experience counts carries the weight of history. We remember what it took to gain access to the ballot and to make our voices count once we got there. When that history is erased, the whole country loses part of the story of who fought to make democracy’s promises real. That is why I take heart when women and people of color break barriers to public office. It is also why I pay attention when Black women lose jobs. A lost paycheck can mean a family postpones a doctor’s visit or falls behind on rent. Empathy begins with seeing those consequences, and public policy can either ease them or deepen them.
Our capacity for kindness is tested in the way immigration officers treat people in their custody, in the attention a White House ballroom receives while families struggle to afford groceries, and in how seriously we reckon with the human cost of war with Iran and displacement across the region. How we treat people matters whether they live next door or across an ocean. There is courage in kindness, especially when defending someone’s dignity costs us something. Sometimes kindness means standing beside a neighbor. Sometimes it means standing up to the people who have the power to harm them.
My father used to tell me there was nothing new under the sun and that the only constants were death and taxes. He would say that people swing far to the right and far to the left, and eventually find themselves looking for the center again. I hear a spiritual wisdom in what he was trying to teach me about balance. In public life, it takes balance to hold conviction alongside humility, to use power with restraint, and to remember the humanity of people with whom we disagree. It takes that same steadiness to face injustice when the truth unsettles us.
The deeper meaning of this election will come into focus in the choices we make after the votes are counted. Will we defend the dignity of people who have little power? Will we tell the truth about our history, including the parts that make us uncomfortable? Will we govern as though our neighbors’ well-being is bound up with our own?
I believe our common humanity can guide how we live together as Americans. When empathy shapes whose needs we see, and kindness shapes what we do with the power we have, that is change I can believe in.
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