The saying goes, “Don’t judge another person until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes.”

It seems a quaint, Depression-era notion today.  Who walks a mile anywhere?  Who judges status by shoes?  Who wears shoes till they are worn through?   Who withholds judgment until they see, listen and come to an understanding themselves?   Really?  Be honest.

An 8-minute exercise led by our team at Alpine Area Agency on Aging gave me a gift of empathy–through experiencing isolation, impairment, and discomfort.  The exercised is intended for a group to debrief afterward with the trained staff, though the exercise experienced alone. Very alone. I shuffled and bumped my way through a mile. The Virtual Dementia Tour is a trademarked exercise that began as P.K Beville’s Ph. D. that induces participants to exhibit the traits of a condition, experience it, and be allowed to feel “a window into their world” as an aging person does.  Be prepared for it to be a visceral, rather than intellectual experience.

As I struggled through glasses, headphones, gloves and shoe inserts designed to simulate impairments to navigate daily activities, I became quietly frustrated and agitated.  I felt very alone.  So much of my current self-esteem & image are based on how gracefully I believe that I navigate through my world and connect with others. I felt the isolation of impairment.  I felt the inevitability of my own mortality.   It made visible my own vulnerability, and the narrowing that accompanies age.   It was overwhelming, though the debrief underscored the object of the exercise—empathy can invoke action.  The exercise unsettled me.  AAAA staff will be taking this Virtual Dementia Tour to an organization near you.   I highly recommend it if you want to step into the shoes of someone with dementia.

Those 8-minutes were uncomfortable. Reflecting upon them put me in my mother-in-law’s shoes.  She lives over 1,000 miles from us. Calls take considerable patience and don’t occur frequently. My wife is often trying to discern in the conversation who was the last person she had contact with–besides a grocery clerk. I thought of her. No, for a few moments, I felt I was inside the much-reduced shell of her world. I also flashed-back to elders, now passed, with whom I was impatient in my youth well before I began to suffer the myriad indignities of aging myself as I do now. It is said that those who suffer themselves are more empathetic. This must be true even if the suffering is brief… and constructed.  

It is one thing to tap into empathy for a relative. The walls that separate us from those on the street are thicker. I have heard that during the Depression and well into the WWII era Americans were less judgmental of each other and more eager to help. It is no wonder that the years of our greatest improvements in health, equity and justice followed that period of common suffering. Most of us at some level know we cannot escape aging, and we know someone we love who has deteriorated. So “…if you spot some hollow ancient eyes, please don’t just pass ‘em by and stare, say hello in there.  Hello” – John Prine, 1971

Our inability to identify across socio-economic divide, across the urban-rural divide, the red and blue divide and to those who are escaping injustice across the world now defines us. We seem to have accepted this state of affairs. Were such an empathy exercise as the Dementia Tour to exist for us to understand each other across these divisions, our current politics might begin to overcome the politics of division and correct itself. We might find the middle again. 

How do we understand the deep anger people feel, or the experience of racism, the lives of immigrants, for those disenfranchised & hopeless economically?     Today we form our impressions instantly, accept themn as delivered to us through media, technology and politics which seek to group us.  The art of empathic-focus takes time.  It is disorienting, unsettling, uncomfortable. Those who have suffered seem more willing to question themselves, and are more skeptical of unearned truths being handed to them

Allowing ourselves to be sorted without first taking that walk has consequences.  On the heels of race-related shootings in three towns in recent weeks, Sahil Chinoy, graphics editor for the New York Times depicted how our potential for “organized mass violence” increases as we allow ourselves to be sorted politically through a handful of simple identity questions attached to his OP ed Quiz.   The graphic depicts how few questions it takes to sort us. The point, people have become disturbingly predictable.  We willfully isolate ourselves through “identity politics,” making us easy to manipulate as the Russians understood in the 2016 presidential election.  The article points out that identity politics, once accused of the left has now become the norm.

Our first step to understanding and feeling compassion for others is by refusing to be reduced ourself to the rallying cries, labels, and package of norms that any particular identity group espouses.  This rejection of in-group identity is a countercultural act in the age of hashtags and brand identity.  As we allow our humanity to be distilled of complexity, we impede our ability to walk a mile with others and we cut off the opportunity to see others for who they are.

Walking that metaphorical mile requires a will-to-care; a will to reach out beyond our comfort, beyond our own identity.  The rewards of taking that time are telling.  There have been times in our nation’s history when our identity was broadly shared and the law followed with leaps of inclusion. We have occasionally emerged from troubled times with an expansion of justice for excluded groups, often followed by periods of prosperity.  Many of our Constitutional amendments seemed to move us away from discrimination, toward a more just, inclusive society.  That is certainly not the current trend.  Today, fewer of us care enough to take the time to understand those close to us, like an aging relative, or the immigrants who work among us.  Or those neighbors down the street.  Most of us don’t even get the chance to read about them because of the algorithms of the internet. The great news organizations like the New York Times still take the time to report without judgment and often write lengthy articles that open the door to understanding those living in different circumstances. You are more likely to find them by flipping through the pages yourself. Most of the visual media is absorbed in blips designed to grab our attention are sorted to us by the internet, and often just reinforce our default perceptions. This is how Big Brother is taking over, by catering to us. Taking the time to search read can expand one’s empathy.

The current zeitgeist of inempathy allows things to be normalized which a more self-conscious society would not have allowed just a few years ago. Inclusiveness feels like it is rapidly eroding.  To the point, Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was asked this month if the words written by Emma Lazarus inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty, “remained part of the American ethos?”

“give me your tired, your poor,

your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door”

His reply to the elegant poem dripping with empathy, “they certainly are,” he told NPR, “give me your tired and poor—who can stand on their own two feet and who will not become a public charge.”  The judgment packed into that rewrite is stunning.  Who is accused of being a “public charge” for writing off interest on their mortgage, claiming exemptions for their children, getting tax breaks for starting a business, or enrolling in Medicare or collecting Social Security, yet these are all public gifts?

So much for a “golden door.”  That such a boldly judgmental statement can emerge from the lead U.S. immigration official’s mouth today without widespread rebuke shows how far we have come from walking a mile in an other’s shoes.  It also ignores the data around immigrants as productive, law-abiding and dedicated Americans. That lack of outcry is another sign that so much that is happening at the national level, especially in immigration policy, is intended to underscore identity politics and draw us away from our humanity and our most aspirational ideals—away from empathic-understanding and head-long into judgment. 

Lazarus’ poem resonates with hope, expresses a shared vision of opportunity, and deep empathy for a shared human condition of suffering.  Unpack “yearning to breathe free:” which implies the shores are open to those who seek the gleaming light of this nations shared aspirations, that are open to human beings who simply aspire to a more just and opportune condition.  This was always been aspirational.   Our lack of empathy allows us to emphasize personal freedoms while ignoring the shared freedoms that bind us, and the beacon of hope that this country has been proud to be for those around the world. That aspiration begins with our humanity, and willingness to walk a mile in another person’s shoes.

Who identifies with “the wretched” anymore?   Who really identifies with their mother-in-law?   Who speaks policy elegantly enough to be worthy of poetry?  

Our struggle to identify with “the other” is hardly new, but it is high time we began.  Taking the time and effort to do so could save us from our wretched selves.