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The Center for Building a Culture of Empathy |
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Obama Video Clips > Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama,
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(from Preface of 2004 edition)
And then, on September 11, 2001, the world fractured.
It’s beyond my skill as a writer to capture that day, and the days that would
follow-the planes, like specters, vanishing into steel and glass; the
slow-motion cascade of the towers crumbling into themselves; the ash-covered
figures wandering the streets; the anguish and the fear. Nor do I pretend to
understand the stark nihilism that drove the terrorists that day and that drives
their brethren still. My powers of empathy,
my ability to reach into another’s heart, cannot penetrate the blank stares of
those who would murder innocents with abstract, serene satisfaction.
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Chapter 13:
One of them could be me. Standing
there, I try to remember the days when I would have been sitting in a car like
that, full of inarticulate resentments and desperate to prove my place in the
world. The feelings of righteous anger as I shout at Gramps for some forgotten
reason. The blood rush of a high school brawl. The swagger that carries me into
a classroom drunk or high, knowing that my teachers will smell beer or reefer on
my breath, just daring them to say something. I start picturing myself through
the eyes of these boys, a figure of random authority, and know the calculations
they might now be making, that if one of them can’t take me out, the four of
them certainly can.
That knotted, howling assertion of self-as I try to pierce the darkness and read the shadowed faces inside the car, I’m thinking that while these boys may be weaker or stronger than I was at their age, the only difference that matters is this: The world in which I spent those difficult times was far more forgiving. These boys have no margin for error; if they carry guns, those guns will offer them no protection from that truth. And it is that truth, a truth that they surely sense but can’t admit and, in fact, must refuse if they are to wake up tomorrow, that has forced them, or others like them, eventually to shut off access to any empathy they may once have felt. Their unruly maleness will not be contained, as mine finally was, by a sense of sadness at an older man’s injured pride. Their anger won’t be checked by the intimation of danger that would come upon me whenever I split another boy’s lip or raced down a highway with gin clouding my head. As I stand there, I find myself thinking that somewhere down the line both guilt and empathy speak to our own buried sense that an order of some sort is required, not the social order that exists, necessarily, but something more fundamental and more demanding; a sense, further, that one has a stake in this order, a wish that, no matter how fluid this order sometimes appears, it will not drain out of the universe. I suspect that these boys will have to search long and hard for that order-indeed, any order that includes them as more than objects of fear or derision. And that suspicion terrifies me, for I now have a place in the world, a job, a schedule to follow. As much as I might tell myself otherwise, we are breaking apart, these boys and me, into different tribes, speaking a different tongue, living by a different code.
