Empathy: having the ability to understand and share feelings with others.

A lot of people hear this word and just think of the one-half of the definition, the share feelings with others. It is inherent in people to want to talk about how they feel, what they are thinking, and make everything about them. There is nothing wrong with that unless all you talk about is yourself, or border on selfishness and being conceited. What people need to focus more on is the understanding aspect of empathy.

Empathy is not hard. Unless you are a sociopath, or cannot feel emotion. If that is the case, this article is not for you, but I digress. Empathy is two parts: sharing how you feel is the first, and understanding how others feel is the second, possibly more necessary aspect of empathy. Look at the world today! You can go on Twitter and see everyone voicing THEIR thoughts and feelings, and rarely see how others acknowledge the feelings and lives of others.

There are people that look at the world and want to bend it to their will with disregard for how it affects others. Look at the current President. Look at the things he has “achieved” that are so “great”. His lack of empathy is barring people, people that are trying to escape war zones and head to a safe haven, a.k.a. the United States, from entering this country.

Religious peoples, true religious peoples, understand that it is not right to persecute others from where they come from or what they believe in. Christians, Jewish peoples, Muslims, Buddhists, etcetera etcetera. They have all suffered persecution, and should all be empathetic to those that have become refugees; to all those that have been removed from their homes and robbed of their possessions. Countless races have suffered the same and continue to do so to this day. Why does this continue to happen over and over again throughout history?

A lack of empathy.

True empathy. All parts of it INCLUDING the understanding part. Especially the understanding part! What kind of world would we live in, no, could live in, if we could just try and understand each other. It would be a beautiful world! People would stop discriminating! Racism would cease! There would be considerably less conflict. Elections would be fairer, less biased. The world would be amazing, and what is stopping it from becoming this way?

A lack of empathy.

Everyone is afraid of what the other person feels. Racists are scared of minorities because they are different. Because they can’t bear to see through their eyes and see how they have been treated. Americans that show distress over immigrants cannot fathom what they are going through, nor want to because the idea scares them. They afraid of the lives that other people live, and to understand how they feel would mean to realize that the world is not a perfectly safe place. It is filled with violence, bigotry, and plainly just evil.

Now I am asking you, reader. Take a moment, whether it be at work, or at school and you want to procrastinate, or want to avoid your responsibilities, or maybe want to be open-minded, and think of something or someone that you hate. Now, try and imagine life through their eyes. Imagine what horrors they might have to go through every day. Even if you do not know a lot about the person or thing, use what you know or try and infer the rest. Now that you have done this, try and understand the thing you hate and why it is the way it is. The more you do this, the less you hate, and the happier the world can be.