#Empathy

The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.

When Clark said “he’s not even a very good dog but he’s all alone and he’s probably scared so i have to go get him” I was so happy because someone in that writers room truly understands superman better than we’ve seen in a long time. This is the essence of superman - that every living being deserves kindness and empathy and love simply because they are alive. Clark is the kind of guy who’d cry when he got stung by a bee not because it hurt but because the bee died when it stung him and someone in the writers room knew that and made sure it came through.

...the safe

"Abs or biceps" actually i'd prefer a man with a functioning brain pls

I feel like kids would be less "loud/annoying/tantrum prone/whatever the complaint about them is this week" if they weren't forced to live in a world that doesn't treat them like human beings and constantly forced to obey the whims of other people with no consideration for their own thoughts and emotions. And if they weren't actively conscious of this. Blaming kids for occasionally breaking down over their treatment is like blaming women for yelling at their abusive husbands or crying about the sexism inherent in society. It's "the women's disease/hysteria" but directed at children instead of women.

Even if they have genuinely loving families that don't neglect them, which is rare, children are still put under constant abuse from every other aspect of their life. They're living on ultra-mega-hard-mode. Emotions are understandable.

I also completely understand people who can't be around loud children, or who hate it when a kid breaks down crying or screaming in a store or a restaurant. I hate it when a kid breaks down crying or screaming in a restaurant or store. Like, that's not an unreasonable feeling to have when someone is making an uncomfortable amount of noise. I get it. You don't want that kid to be crying or screaming any more than they want to be doing it.

These kids didn't ask to be forced to sit in a fancy restaurant in uncomfortable clothes around people they don't like eating disgusting food for hours. Those kids didn't ask to be hauled around a supermarket looking at things they're not allowed to have. That kid is crying because they're in a situation they don't want to be in, and they probably didn't have any say over how they got there. They've been forced into Situations for probably their entire lives, and sometimes they snap and have breakdowns. Breaking down after the level of constant psychological abuse inherent in modern childhood would be considered normal and understandable for any other age group, but when children do it it's considered irrational and bothersome and annoying. I get that empathy and compassion are hard, we're all suffering, but maybe for once try to have some instead of just writing the suffering of children off as too annoying to deal with.

empathy is the best quality a person can have

“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” - G.M. Gilbert