The Audacity of Hope

always easy to get along with; he was at once warmhearted and quick to anger, and in
part because his career had not been particularly successful, his feelings could also be
easily bruised. By the time I was sixteen we were arguing all the time, usually about me
failing to abide by what I considered to be an endless series of petty and arbitrary
rules—filling up the gas tank whenever I borrowed his car, say, or making sure that I
rinsed out the milk carton before I put it in the garbage.
With a certain talent for rhetoric, as well as an absolute certainty about the merits of my
own views, I found that I could generally win these arguments, in the narrow sense of
leaving my grandfather flustered, angry, and sounding unreasonable. But at some point,
perhaps in my senior year, such victories started to feel less satisfying. I started thinking
about the struggles and disappointments he had seen in his life. I started to appreciate
his need to feel respected in his own home. I realized that abiding by his rules would
cost me little, but to him it would mean a lot. I recognized that sometimes he really did
have a point, and that in insisting on getting my own way all the time, without regard to
his feelings or needs, I was in some way diminishing myself.
There’s nothing extraordinary about such an awakening, of course; in one form or
another it is what we all must go through if we are to grow up. And yet I find myself
returning again and again to my mother’s simple principle—“How would that make you
feel?”—as a guidepost for my politics.
It’s not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to be
suffering from an empathy deficit. We wouldn’t tolerate schools that don’t teach, that
are chronically underfunded and understaffed and underinspired, if we thought that the
children in them were like our children. It’s hard to imagine the CEO of a company
giving himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while cutting health-care coverage for his
workers if he thought they were in some sense his equals. And it’s safe to assume that
those in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned
their own sons and daughters in harm’s way.
I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in
favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all, if they are like us,
then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves.
But that does not mean that those who are struggling—or those of us who claim to
speak for those who are struggling—are thereby freed from trying to understand the
perspectives of those who are better off. Black leaders need to appreciate the legitimate
fears that may cause some whites to resist affirmative action. Union representatives
can’t afford not to understand the competitive pressures their employers may be under. I
am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush’s eyes, no matter how much I
may disagree with him. That’s what empathy does—it calls us all to task, the
conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the
oppressor. We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our
limited vision.
No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.
Of course, in the end a sense of mutual understanding isn’t enough. After all, talk is
cheap; like any value, empathy must be acted upon. When I was a community organizer