A Quote by Michael Eric Dyson
My empathy for poor people comes from having been one of them for so long, from knowing that their humanity is more complex and that the truths of their suffering have to be told honestly.
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People have always told tales. Long before humanity learned to write and gradually became literate, everybody told tales to everybody else and everybody listened to everybody else's tales. Before long it became clear that some of the still illiterate storytellers told more and better tales than others, that is, they could make more people believe their lies.
Our house is burning and we look elsewhere. Nature, mutilated and over-exploited, can no longer reconstitute itself and we refuse to admit it. Humanity is suffering. It is suffering from poor development, in the North as in the South, and we are indifferent. The Earth and humanity are in peril and we are all responsible. It is time now to open our eyes
We love wealth, and we hate poor people. I know people who work in TV news who have actually been told to do stand-ups rather than put interviews with poor people on the air. We physically don't want to look at them.
Any man filled with empathy is capable of gaining valuable insights on the human condition through the suffering of others. You do not need to suffer to know suffering, but you need empathy first to identify and feel the suffering of others around you.
People.. were poor not because they were stupid or lazy. They worked all day long, doing complex physical tasks. They were poor because the financial institution in the country did not help them widen their economic base.
Just having the internet is a weird and dangerous thing because people become accustomed to knowing things when they want to know them and not having to work for it. I definitely see the value in not knowing everything and having mystery in life and mystery in people.
I don't know how I could have been more explicit. I gave them a roadmap and a flashlight, but they didn't go where I told them to go, they didn't look where I told them to look, they didn't tell the people I told them to call.
Unfortunately, we no longer live in a culture where what is spoken about and what truths are told and what lies are told are objective any more, so my personal feeling is that you have to try to take them on.
As far as I am concerned, the greatest suffering is to feel alone, unwanted, unloved. The greatest suffering is also having no one, forgetting what an intimate, truly human relationship is, not knowing what it means to be loved, not having a family or friends.
Empathy isn’t just listening, it’s asking the questions whose answers need to be listened to. Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination. Empathy requires knowing you know nothing. Empathy means acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.
We live in a world with serious class complexes. It is one thing to be a college student with loan debts and another thing to be just dirt poor for your entire life. The challenge is to come up with more complex understandings of where we are, more global awareness of what connects Americans with what is happening with suffering and oppressed people all around the world.
The poor, you know, have a way of solving problems...they have a tremendous capacity for suffering. And so when you build a vehicle to get something done, as we've done here in the strike and the boycott, then they continue to suffer - and maybe a little bit more - but the suffering becomes less important because they see a chance of progress; sometimes progress itself. They've been suffering all their live.s It's a question of suffering with some kind of hope now. That's better than suffering with no hope at all.
My journey has mainly been driven by empathy towards people who I thought were suffering.
It is people who go through suffering that have an empathy for the suffering of others.
I'm not a pacifist. I think the suffering of innocent people can be a catalyst for moral action. But empathy puts too much weight on the scale in favor of war. Empathy can really lead to violence.
There's a difference between knowing God and knowing about God. Knowing about God is all of the stuff we've been told and all of the books we've read and all of our religious experiences and what others have told us and tried to convince us of. But knowing God is when we make conscious contact.
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