On Empathy, Courage, and Action

Princeton University's large essay on their application has a question which says,

Using the following quotation from “The Moral Obligations of Living in a Democratic Society” as a starting point, tell us about an event or experience that helped you define one of your values or changed how you approach the world. “Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.” Cornel West, Class of 1943 University Professor in the Center for African American Studies, Princeton University

I've always felt like an extremely empathetic person. When I hear of the terrible things that happen to people everyday I often feel absolutely sick to my stomach imagining the pain that they must be in. But in the cause which is most important to me, environmentalism, my empathetic feelings are shifted more towards the earth itself and the animals that inhabit it. I can use the classic example of polar bears--the precise reason why the World Wildlife Fund and other organizations use them and show you how the mothers can't feed their babies on the decreasing amount of ice is to make you empathize with them and donate. But my most clear, life-changing moment of both empathy and determination came all the way back in the fourth grade.

I'm not completely sure why we did this, but at one point in fourth grade we watched a few videos about deforestation and landfills. I have clear snapshot memories of the landfill video, and it had a huge eye-opening effect. Like most of the other children I had never really considered where my trash went once I threw it away. Surely that was the end of the line; the trash was gone, so why would I think about it? The images of millions of people's garbage covering so much land horrified me, and I felt that deep abjection and aphoria where my entire paradigm of the world shifted. It's hard to express exactly "who" I was having empathy for unless the Earth is a justifiable answer. Over the last few years I have understood more and more that the earth is the being that we inhabit that can't speak for itself, and I've begun to have more and more empathy for it as if it were a person just like you and me.

I could have stopped there, that day in fourth grade, and let the horrors stop. Ignorance is bliss, as they tend to say. But I think my greatest show of courage that resulted from the empathy I had with the Earth was exposing myself to more information that would shock me. I'm constantly searching for more documentaries about everything that we're doing wrong to our Earth, reading more about the science behind climate change, investigating more and more into systems, like waste disposal, that are commonplace but are problematic behind the scenes. Simply searching out more information is the greatest action I think I could have taken. From there, I'm always looking for ways to fix things, starting with myself of course, and spreading the message and ideas to my school community through the Campus Conservation Corps (CCC). Some people take up a cause after being inspired by something, but the inspiration often stems from horror of some kind. I think there's always a day of abjection in our lives when the world is no longer such a wonderful place and we're forced to not only recognized but often cope with what is wrong. The courage step comes between the recognition and the coping, almost just like the quote said. Ever since that video, I have become uber-conscious of my effect on this planet, positive and negative. The Earth needs just as much empathy as any other being, if not more, considering that it is the only being that we all have in common.