If you were fortunate enough to be born into a middle, or even a working class family (like I was) in the US during the late sixties or early seventies, choosing to sleep to what was happening in the world could have been easy. My dad is a carpenter and has had his own business ever since I can remember. Nothing fancy, just one or two, maybe three other guys working with him, depending on the job. My mom stayed at home with us kids, working her butt off, and when I was in junior high she got a job outside of our home. We weren’t rolling in dough by any means… that’s kind of hard even for the best carpenter and the thriftiest homemaker in the world to pull off when there are nine kids to provide for, but I never felt like we were poor. Money (or the lack thereof, which was more often the case than not) was something to be worked around.

But even needing to ‘work around’ money, our standard of living, in comparison with the rest of the world, was and is staggeringly better than a lot of places. We were doing okay, so why should we care about farm workers who were on strike in California in the 1970’s, trying to make more than a few dollars a day? What did we care if there was a CIA-backed coup in Chile of the democratically elected president, and a brutal dictatorship (friendly to US business interests) put in its place? Why should we want to know what our government was doing in Vietnam? Or Indonesia? Or El Salvador and Nicaragua? Or even right here in our own country? We lived, compared to many other places, in the promised land, and complacency was not only the norm, it was encouraged. It was unpatriotic to question, much like today… some things never change, huh? Needless to say, we were the weird family in the neighborhood. I remember boycotting table grapes and lettuce for years when I was a little girl in support of the farm workers. My first memory of TV was watching Gerald Ford being sworn in as President after Nixon resigned in the wake of Watergate. My parents were union democrats from union families, and they believed that they must support the rest of the working class, everywhere. This belief was an entry point for them to become politicized about other issues that didn’t directly affect them.

I think a huge part of the process of my parents waking up to what was going on in the world, and passing that awareness on to us kids, was their sense of empathy. They had the ability to put themselves in the place of another person, and the sensibility that they needed to do something about another person’s suffering if they could. My mother decided that the Vietnam war was wrong before my dad did, and not because of politics. She said she laid in bed one night, thinking ‘What would I do if our house were to come under attack by bombs and soldiers and I had to try to gather my seven children and keep them safe? How would I be able to do that?‘ She thought of the countless mothers in Vietnam who were trying to do just that, and knew she couldn’t support the war any longer.

Sometimes I think that what is lacking most in our world is a sense of compassion, a sense of empathy. That somehow people, all of us, have forgotten that we’re supposed to care about each other, even if we don‘t like one another. As I’ve talked to people over the years about various causes and social movements and political ideologies, the times I’ve been the most effective at getting someone to think about something in way they hadn’t before were the times I listened, and then asked them to get into another person’s shoes in a way that didn‘t condemn or demean them. We need to challenge not only others, but ourselves, to continually wake up to the world around us. There’s definitely a time for ‘in your face‘. I try to remember that it’s always time for ‘in your shoes‘, and that in your shoes should always be my guiding principle, even when in your face is what I’m doing.