We are going to need you for the big push heading into November.

Don

i do massive research on behaviors and spend a lifetime in observation. my thing. i love. like a hobby. a quest. people would tell me i dont get it. i would tell them, hey... i approach very academically, with common sense and observation. of course my point is valid.

the same applied with raising children.

older, i married. and i had children. and those people were right.

now i get where the single person is coming from. i also get where the married person was coming from. i get the person who never had kids, but i get the parent, too.

i know damn well i cannot get certain things cause i have not experienced them. so i fuckin shut up and LISTEN. it allows me to have a greater understanding which is my quest. but i will not be arrogant enough to override anothers experience to tell them how they are suppose to feel, what they are suppose to think

And sometimes by listening, and pushing back my instinct to say "I understand how you feel", I actually learn something.

marriage and having kids is invariably a state of suffering.

What I'm talking about has nothing to do with arrogance, or not listening, or overriding another person's experience.


I was abused physically, emotionally and sexually during my childhood. I would never make the blanket statement that someone couldn't understand because they hadn't had the experiences I've had.

Never.

not having a childhood like yours, i would know there is no way for me to get all you experience, what you brought into adulthood, how it effects you now, and how you should deal with it.

cali, with your experience i would listen and ask a whole lot of questions. to better understand. because your experience is so foreign to me, i could not even begin to say, i understand. i get it. cause reality is, i am clueless. regardless of the number of stories i have heard on this subject, i had the total opposite growing up.

you can empathize and grasp that it HAS effected me and that I have brought baggage from it into adulthood. That's precisely my point.

actually, i went back and re read your post. you hit a button.

" I believe most of us here at DU fit that description,"

and you made me think it thru a tad more.

there are a few that seem to lack empathy. and i am always battling with those people or hearing them the loudest. so when reading your OP, i was thinking about them, instead of du as a whole.

with a lot of the issues i will bring them to my experience as a woman. i can get certain discrimination because of experiences as a woman. i do remember a black friend, a decade ago, talking about finding a man in her culture and how hard it was, at her age. and what was wanted and expected out of her.

i told her, .... there is no way i would put up with that shit.

she looked me in the eye and said, your culture is different from mine. it shut me up.

these lessons make me be quiet and understand that i can understand over all, but it does not mean i know all.

but i agree, my experience with discrimination allows me to recognize, hear this when said to me, makes me think.....

thanks cali.

i dont know what issue had you start this OP. but, you are making me think. when all this trev stuffed first happened, and listening to obama say, his son.... i was thinking, i have a son that age. my son. and as soon as i said that i pictured my white son. and there was no way i could put my white son in that position. i kNEW, it was not my son. so, when the video of the white girl saying, that is not me, i cannot place myself in the same position as black people, i got it. cause it had hit me way earlier.

i think that was an important video, and true. and that alone, if we do not recognize that our position as white is different from someone who is black, then we are lacking the ability to empathize. and that may be where some of the anger is coming from.

as i say, i have not been in these threads, and i do not know what your particular issue is. but i see so many men fight the "male privilege" concept, that for me, they are lacking the ability to acknowledge, recognize.

I adopted a 9 year old from foster care, and though I can imagine what she went through it is not the same as living it.

That finally hit me when I was in a meeting with my daughter and her counselor. At some point it became clear how differently we viewed "feeling safe."

My 13 year old almost never felt safe.
I almost never felt "not safe."

While those two concepts can be imagined, the impact on her life was not something that I could imagine, except as she told me.

It meant that if I came home earlier than expected that she might be holding a knife to defend herself.
It meant that I discovered a knife under her mattress.
It meant that she took risks because she didn't trust her assessment of what was safe and what wasn't.
It meant that if I were late, she assumed that I had died.
It meant that when she was 18 and speaking to groups about being adopted and her early life experiences that she would say, "I still sometimes find it hard to feel safe."
It meant that when a daughter of a victim of violence that I helped said to her mom, "Safe never felt so good before," that I knew that victims of violence understand "feeling safe" if a different way, no matter how hard I try to imagine.

...Sometimes I can help. Sometimes I can't. But I can always care."

Often, having personal experience does help one to understand better; and the lack of it can lead to the 'Marie Antoinette' phenomenon. But many people understand and sympathize things that they've never experienced, and on the other hand, there is a corollary of the Marie Antoinette phenomenon - what I call the Norman Tebbit phenomenon, after a very right-wing British politician, originally from a poor background. The Tebbits of the world have suffered hardships; have managed by luck or toughness to overcome them, and take the attitude: 'Well, I had to deal with it; I pulled myself up by my bootstraps without asking for help; so why shouldn't everybody else?!'

We have the Herman Cains. Someone managed to do it, so everyone else should have the same barriers.

There is something different in learning by observation and learning by experience. Experience is a quick teacher, and observation can be for a long time without actually internalizing it. There are millions of people around the world learning English by observation in the classroom. Some may even go through 12 years of schooling with English as a foreign language. And when it comes to actual communication, they are not as successful as a 6 year old native speaker of English.

What's even more frustrating are people who make faulty observations (Gingrich, Santorum), and then pontificate on how we should learn from their "experience".

I've been wondering what the effect is on white Americans of having 'whites' represented in such a negative way. I can see some really heroic efforts at solidarity and 'empathy' which have to tug at the self-image of these thoughtful folks. I've been trying to remind myself of how fragile these relationships can be; and how fragile and vulnerable our own psyches can be as characterizations and generalizations are made.

But, I can only imagine . . .

where you expressed empathy for another. "Perhaps not exactly..." as you state. I am not trying to be combative, but this is the impression I have of you from reading your posts over the years.

Especially if you are of one group, but not of another - why wouldn't women or gays understand something about being excluded that African Americans would face - why wouldn't African Americans somewhat be able to understand what gays go through?

One person here made a post to the effect of, "you're white, so STFU." Not really helpful - so the real purpose is to "win" or dominate the discussion unchallenged in any way. And then if you can't do that with progressives, how can you with the white centrists? I talk to white racists (they deny it) and it would never work with them anyway. So all it does it sort of push away help from those who would have empathy.

While it would be churlish to suggest that someone's personal experience is meaningless, it is also problematic to allow someone's personal experience to trump more generalized observations. To take the common example - while there are definite commonalities in being black in America, there are also unique aspects to each life.

To understand the an individual black person's life, it's best to listen and be empathetic; to understand the experience of being black in America as a whole, observation of large numbers of individuals might be more effective.

Bryant