Walk a mile in my shoes (or someone else's)

I just watched a very thought provoking 18 minute long video that a friend shared with me on Facebook. The subject of the video, a stage presentation by sociologist Sam Richards, is empathy. Do you know what empathy is? Many don’t understand the simple concept. It is, simply, the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, and to see and feel things from their point of view. Different from sympathy, the outpouring of emotion and caring for someone else in a bad situation, empathy is perhaps as important to the human condition as love, and almost as certainly one cannot truly exist without the other.
Ive always considered myself to be empathetic. I see people in a situation, and almost always try to imagine myself in their shoes, and sometimes I can, sometimes I cannot. The seven years I spent as friend and guardian to the late Jackson C. Frank http://heyyyyyabbott.blogspot.com/2010/12/jackson-c-frank-remembered.html were a challenge because no matter how hard I tried I could not exactly understand what burns over 50 percent of the body must feel like, not to mention having my joints fused together by massive amounts of calcium deposits. But for less extraordinary situations I can do pretty well in the empathy department.
Or so I thought.
Walking through the deep south, with no one around to talk to save for a few phone calls daily, I have all kinds of time to reflect and observe the human condition, deep south version, and it is dismaying. When I get food and drink at gas stations (my principal stopping places) I see all kinds of stereotypical “redneck southern “ types, and I think about what made them that way, and the only logical conclusion, based on the condition of the buildings, and the places I have passed through, is abject poverty, combined with sub-standard education. That mix creates a person who is easily led down the wrong roads, whether it is as drugs, booze, crime or something else. For exampke: the epidemic of meth usage here is stunning in its destructiveness, and at each town I pass through I hear someone talking about how bad their town is overrun with meth heads, and I usually get the “Watch out for them” as I pass by. It does wear me down to always fear that Ill get held up for my phone, laptop, or whatever else I might have, whether it makes sense or not.
I see them… men, and some women, as they get out of work, head to the gas station for a case of beer and cigarettes, and wonder if that is all their lives are about---work, beer, cigarettes, work, beer cigarettes,,,ad infinitum…and it makes me sad. Life is so much more, and so much more rewarding the fuller and richer it is. These folks, with their lack of education and poor standard of living, are fodder for the political machinery that would sweet talk them in their own accent, would promise them the world, and then not deliver, and giving complicated excuses why they were unable to deliver, and it is just accepted because these people do n t know any better.
So, empathy, standing in someone else’s shoes….is not a pretty thing sometimes. It takes courage to really step out of your own comfort zone and make the effort to see what you might not want to see.
Can you do it?