ESPN.com - Unleashing the power of empathy

ESPN.com: Page 2

Tuesday, September 10, 2002
Updated: September 25, 5:58 PM ET
Unleashing the power of empathy

By Eric Neel
Page 2 columnist

Page 2's "Critical Mass" is a weekly survey of what's happening at the busy intersection of sports and pop culture.


	We try but ultimately fail to comprehend what the survivors and victims' families and friends have gone through.

I'm not any less angry or hurt than I was a year ago. In fact, I'm angrier, and more devastated at the thought of what happened, than ever. I can't begin to comprehend what the victims' families and friends, and what the survivors, must feel every day.

They must be exhausted. It must take everything they have just to do the simplest, most mundane things.

I want to feel what they are going through. I want to have some sense of it.

At the same time, I'm afraid of that feeling, and I want to keep it at a distance.

I think some days that I am close to them and, of course, in other ways, I know that I am so far away. I think empathy -- genuine, leave-yourself-exposed, put-the-other-before-you empathy -- is something I owe them. But it's a hard bill to pay, because the scale of their feeling is so wildly out of whack with anything I have ever known.

Why try? Why not deal in broader, more comfortable, strokes, like sorrow and loss, memory and tribute? Why not keep the details (the names and faces published day after day in The New York Times for weeks, the cell phone calls, the million scraps of paper floating through the air) at bay?

		I want to believe the families, friends and survivors might sense that people they've never met are thinking about them, that people they will never know are knocked off their moorings by what's happened, and they're thinking about them, wanting them to hurt less.

I don't know. Most of the time I do. Most of the time, like everybody else, I'm too scared or too wrapped up in the comings and goings of my own life to do anything else. But I think there ought to be moments, lots of them -- not just anniversary moments, but run-of-the-mill, quotidian-patterns-and-rhythms moments -- when I step out of what I'm thinking and doing and try to think of, and to imagine myself alongside of, the people who have lost so much.

I just want to believe that it could matter in some invisible way. I want to believe the families, friends and survivors might sense that people they've never met are thinking about them, that people they will never know are knocked off their moorings by what's happened, and they're thinking about them, wanting them to hurt less.

I hate the way an anniversary -- one year, or 100 years -- makes a historical fact of something. I hate that the attack is true and irrevocable. I want to hold something open. I want possibility rather than truth; I want something to be ongoing rather than over and done with, and I guess I think that's on me, on us, on any of us who are angry and saddened by what the terrorists did. It's on us to leave ourselves open to the feeling, to try to imagine, to deal in detail, to empathize.

There are games being played today, and there will be ceremonies and rituals before and during them. I suspect all of them will be fitting and moving, and that they will help many people grieve and remember. Public ceremonies and gatherings bring an important kind of eloquence to things. Their poetry can soften the jagged edges of experience and memory or bend the sorrow into what Langston Hughes once called a "golden note." And the chance to be part of a crowd, to engage in a sort of collective attention, is healthy.


	From large public ceremonies to personal reflections, we're brought back to the confusion and grief we felt Sept. 11, 2001.

I wish I were going to be at a game tonight, but not for the ceremonies or for the chance to escape into the soothing sounds and smells of the ballpark (though I do want all those things). I wish I were at a game because I want to be with sports fans.

This might sound strange, frivolous, even heretical, but sports fans are good at memory and empathy. They don't file things away -- they keep them fresh in their minds. They don't feature the distance between themselves and others, they identify with their teams, their guys, their friends. They see themselves in others. They live lives of imaginary connections that become real to them. They build bridges across time and distance and make themselves vulnerable to emotions high and low. I wish I were among them tonight.

I think they're especially capable of the kind of feeling I want to feel, especially willing to reckon with hurt and to see themselves, even when it's unbelievably hard to do so, in someone else's situation. I want to be with them because, though I don't know how or why, I know we would, each of us, and for different reasons, get checked up and waylaid by some memory or some thought or image of what happened Sept. 11 and what has happened since.

I want to feel checked up, I want us all to feel checked up ... tonight, tomorrow night, a month from now, six years down the line at a meaningless ballgame, four years after that, for no reason at all.

Eric Neel reviews sports culture in his "Critical Mass" column, which will appear every Wednesday on Page 2. You can e-mail him at eneel@cox.net.