“Fear can be the enemy of empathy”: Leslie Jamison on Ferguson, Ebola and America’s painful 2014

[applegrove]

“Fear can be the enemy of empathy”: Leslie Jamison on Ferguson, Ebola and America’s painful 2014

by Michele Filgate at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/26/fear_can_be_the_enemy_of_empathy_leslie_jamison_on_ferguson_ebola_and_americas_painful_2014/

"SNIP....................


Your collection is in so many ways about pain, about how we face and discuss and experience illness and pain. So I’m curious about a story that broke after your book was published: How do you think our country is handling Ebola victims and the medical workers who have traveled overseas?

I was doing an event in Chicago a few days after Craig Spencer was diagnosed with Ebola — after returning from his work for Doctors Without Borders — and all of New York was going crazy and the Internet was publishing maps of where he’d gone bowling in Williamsburg and where he’d eaten a snack and which subway lines he’d ridden. Somebody asked me whether I felt like Americans were showing enough empathy about Ebola. It was something I’d already thought about in relation to the uproar over Spencer — how sometimes fear can be the enemy of empathy.

If this man were going through something similar in a faraway place — i.e., he’d been doing important medical work and had gotten diagnosed with a potentially fatal illness — people might have respected his bravery. But in this case, many people’s primary reactions had to do with their own proximity to danger. It was striking to me how that sense of fear — a kind of communal panic — seemed to trump feeling empathy for him, much less respecting him for the choices he’d made. One of the things we need to push back against in order to access feelings of empathy and understanding can be various kinds of self-concern, fear being one of those.

That said, to be totally honest and tell on myself, I was also checking which subway lines he’d been riding: had I ridden those lines? I know I’m not immune from the infectious quality of communal fear. I also think our response to Ebola illuminates something abiding and unfortunate — that we have a harder time caring about suffering when it’s far away.




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[DonCoquixote]

1. “Fear can be the enemy of empathy”

Exactly why the rich want to keep us all in fear.

[True Blue Door]

2. The most powerful innoculation against fear is reason.

At least in my case. Reason is an indomitable siege engine that can break down the highest walls of fear.

Convince me with scientific arguments that ebola will not infect me, and I would embrace former ebola patients like the President did.

Of course, an ironic part of reason is that I recognize not everyone else understands reason. They need other forms of persuasion.

They need sentiments, and anecdotes, and stories that move them to do what's right.