SibleySept70I’ve written about this picture at length before.  It’s me with mom & dad at Sibley Hospital in 1970.  Dad had cancer and was scheduled to have his eye removed.  The doctors were not sure what they would find when they looked around….so this was meant to be a possible “final family picture.”  Dad would still die far too young, but thankfully we would have 14 more years after this photo.

I’ve thought much more about my father in these past couple months.  Dad died before the proliferation of cable TV news and well before the internet.  Although I think I know – I still wonder what he would be like now had he lived.  He was so curious….he was researching home computers when he died in 1984.

Dad hated ignorance and intolerance…I don’t think he would have devolved into the Fox News watching/Angry Old White Guy.  I do think that he would be appalled by the way we judge others and by our political discourse.  I frequently discuss the lessons that my dad tried to teach me as a boy.  One of his favorite methods of getting a point across was to have me look up a word in the dictionary.  Dinner came to a screeching halt on more than one occasion while he sent me to retrieve the big red book.  One evening the word was “empathy.”  I wish I remembered the situation that prompted it, but I don’t.

It seems like empathy has pretty much disappeared.  A little more would sure be useful.  Empathy won’t solve all our issues, but I can’t think of a better first step for us all.  That includes our Presidential candidates.  I’ve only seen empathy from two or three of them and I’ve really only seen it from one candidate on a consistent basis.  Let’s begin there.  Look it up if you need to.