Ponder: "to widen our lens"

“Almost everyone, including the well off, can be moved to care about the less fortunate and less powerful, in spite of whatever effects wealth may have on them.  Individual stories help.  Exposure helps.  Just paying attention-to the waitress, the person in the crosswalk, the cleaning staff in the corridor of the conference center—helps.  Imagination helps, too.

I know a man who runs a large, urban affiliate of Habitat for humanity, a nonprofit program in which low-income families build their own homes alongside community volunteers and then buy the houses at a reduced rate.  On the first day of construction, he tells me, retired guys from the suburbs itching to break out their power tools show up to work with the future homeowner, often a working single mom with young kids who’s never been on a construction site in her life. ‘They have nothing in common and no idea what to do with each other,’ he says.

Ponder: "sympathy that fails to recognize culpability also fails to recognize potentiality"

Vance conceded that Obama’s comments had been “well-intentioned” and that he had named “legitimate” problems. Nonetheless, he said, Obama’s comments had lacked “sympathy.” Reading “Hillbilly Elegy,” you see what Vance means. Vance is after a certain kind of sympathy: sympathy among equals that doesn’t demean or condescend. Such sympathy can’t be deterministic and categorical. In fact, it must be a little judgmental; it must see the people to whom it’s extended as dignified individuals who retain their moral obligations. For Vance, it’s “anger at Mom for the life she chooses”—recognition of her present-day freedom—that makes “sympathy for the childhood she didn’t” meaningful and humane. That’s because sympathy that fails to recognize culpability also fails to recognize potentiality. It becomes a form of giving up. If you’re a politician representing a troubled community from afar, as many élite politicians must be, then it’s easy to fall into this sympathy trap. At best, you can be a well-intentioned but nonjudgmental—and, therefore, condescending—outsider. Only an insider can speak about his community with honest anguish. “Hillbilly Elegy” is especially compelling because Vance writes with the sorrowful judgment of a betrayed yet loyal son.

Joshua Rothman, "The Lives of Poor White People" The New Yorker 12 Sep. 2016

Ponder: Doubt a little of his own infallibility

“Perhaps all of us, and especially Trump, could take a page from history, from the words of Benjamin Franklin after the writing of a new Constitution.  The debate had been hot and heavy.  There were deep feelings on all sides, and many were expressing strong reservations about signing it.  In calling for ratification, Franklin said, ‘On the whole, sir, I cannot help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it, would with me, on this occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument.

Were we to doubt a little of our own infallibility, perhaps we might find it within ourselves to listen, to give a little more care to viewpoints that differ from ours, expressing the hope that those who voice them care just as much for and believe just as firmly and fervently in their causes as we do in ours.  We might find the gift if a solution.”

William Brock, The U.S. Political Devolution.”  The Washington Post 11 Dec. 2015, A25