I wrote this whole thing before Jimmy Kimmel was pulled off the air for… what seems like no good reason other than that he was critical of the president. I honestly thought about just clicking delete on this entire thing before it actually published. But that’s giving into the bullshit. That’s giving in to the devil on our shoulders saying “it’s easier if you just shut up”. And unfortunately for me, that devil has been put in a very small box and I rarely let him out. So I wasn’t going to today either. I know I don’t have a “following” and I’m probably never going to have anyone who disagrees with me read this. But, I hope if you do disagree, if you think that I’m way off, your response is to have a conversation and try to understand why we disagree or ignore me. To talk through it and have a real honest conversation. Or just let me be. The whole point is, that discourse is good. Challenging our beliefs is good. Being outside of your comfort zone is good. And more than just being good, it’s brave. Being a silencer, being violent, being cruel, being vindictive, being unwilling to hear out someone’s righteous anger isn’t brave. It’s cowardice. And so is submitting before you have to. And I don’t feel like being a coward today.

Let’s peek behind the curtain a little. What I wanted to do here, was to start off by saying, “you know what we never did, get a dictionary definition of empathy”. And then I was going to put the definition up and say “see this is what it is”. Then go into all the blah blah blah about when it’s necessary, and when it’s necessary to not provide it. But the definition was so antiseptic. Like who cares about that? And then my mind pivoted to “why do I care about empathy”, and the reason was very simple… my mom was a 9th grade english teacher and would drill into my head that I needed to think about what Atticus would do.

Atticus, in this case, is Atticus Finch from Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.

And he defines so much of what I believe is representative of empathy. (my mom is celebrating reading this lol)

**“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” **Atticus Finch, in Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird”

So before we get into the nitty gritty of what I want to talk about in this piece, I want to call out WHY this quote means so much to me. And it all centers around the idea of climbing inside someone else’s skin and walking around.

There are two reasons I love it.

1. The idea that you need to walk around in their skin — it’s not about “seeing things from their perspective” it’s embodying them and FEELING what they’re feeling not just in the moment but seeing what led them to that moment! You have to UNDERSTAND them, not just think about what you would do in their situation!
2. The fact that the only way to walk around in someone else’s skin is to shed your own

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And that quote and those two thoughts have been a galvanizing moment for me in my struggles with the differentiation between granting everyone empathy, while also saying that it’s good to challenge people. It’s such a tough balance, because often we associate empathy with the idea of giving people grace and space, or showing that we care about them… but sometimes, is it ok, or even RIGHT to not give people grace and space? Are there times when we SHOULDN’T care about people. It’s already been on my mind, but, then last week happened.

I’ve been listening to and reading all the arguments and trying to understand where I sit on the spectrum of empathy for Charlie Kirk, who was horrifically assassinated in public and streamed to millions and millions of people. As you can probably guess from… well, all this… I’m a “bleeding heart liberal” and fall very far away politically from Charlie Kirk. I’m also a politics junkie and want to know everything that’s going on, so I was already well acquainted with Kirk’s… “ideology.”

And yea, I’m putting that in quotes, partially because I think his politics and ideology are odious and bullshit at the same time. Rage bait and nonsense are fun and all when they’re not hurting people, but his way of working hurt people. Including himself.

So why am I stepping on this third rail and allowing myself to dive into “the discourse”? Because I think it’s a good opportunity to talk about how empathy works in reality, and explore when it’s reasonable to give empathy and/or sympathy and whether there are instances where you shouldn’t provide any empathy at all.

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And in the end I think that the two reasons I love that Atticus line are the means I want to use to the ends of figuring out how I really feel about this specific situation with Charlie Kirk and the more broad “how do you have empathy without losing yourself in the sauce of some people who are genuinely doing bad things”.

The answer, is that empathy doesn’t mean you have to agree with people or even like them.

The first step to empathy is to walk around in someone else’s skin.

Now, doing that doesn’t require you to like the person. Many people don’t like themselves. You don’t need to like them either! But you DO need to understand their perspective and try to understand why they are the way they are.

I try to apply this to Charlie Kirk, and my immediate thought is the same one I have with every shooting I hear about… and that’s that it must have been incredibly scary to be him. It’s terrifying thinking of being shot, let alone so brutally, and in public, and in a setting you’ve been in for most of your adult life.

And then to have the brief fleeting last thoughts of knowing you’ll never see your kids or your wife or your family and friends, and that you also don’t know if they’re all safe. It would be awful and terrifying, just like all of the other shootings that occur across the US every day.

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And then, there’s the realization that, I don’t really know if that’s how he felt. Because I can do my best to walk around in his skin… but there’s no way for me to fully do so outside of my own perspective, which is the second reason I love that quote.

I can think about his potential fear, but then I can also think that he said that he felt gun deaths were the natural cost of “freedom” and the 2nd Amendment. Did he still think that when the bullet hit? Or when he heard the sound of the shot?

If he could go back would he go back and change things? Would he keep doing what he had been doing?

I wanted to think that Donald Trump getting shot would have adjusted his worldview but instead it feels like it emboldened his worst instincts. Would the same have happened if the bullet just missed Charlie? And if it did, would we still have everyone in the world extolling how he “did politics the right way”?

I don’t know. And that’s what I love about the quote from To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s not an acknowledgement that we can’t fully inhabit someone else, but it’s implied. And the implication is that you need to fully think through what they would think in any given situation and then question those beliefs because otherwise you’re just again showing your own biases.

My biases won’t let me tell you that Charlie Kirk was a good person. I didn’t know the man, I just knew the public persona. And I didn’t think he was a good person two weeks ago, and I don’t today either.

But I ALSO don’t care if he was good or bad. Because regardless, he didn’t deserve what happened to him. No one does. If you commit bad acts or are a horrible person, you should be judged either by a jury of your peers, or by your general peers. That judgement should tell you what society thinks of how you act. And that judgement shouldn’t be violence unless it is to prevent even greater violence.

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I think Atticus would say that Charlie was a troubled guy who took his troubles out on people who he believed wronged him or society. And that that wasn’t right any more than it was right to commit violence against him. That if someone disagreed they should do the hard work of talking and understanding instead of the easy work of violence.

OH WAIT HE DID SAY SOMETHING LIKE THAT.

**I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.**Atticus Finch, in Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird”

Having empathy doesn’t mean that you let people do what they want without showing real courage. Empathy is the catalyst to bring you to a courageous poise. Where you stand aside an issue that you know is right and stand up for it.

I bet that Charlie thought he was courageous. I bet that a lot of people I disagree with were courageous. But the courage isn’t coming from acting like a strong man, advocating violence, or calling out people and saying terrible things about them.

It’s saying that no one should die of gun violence regardless of their politics or statements they’ve made EVEN when they advocate for violence against others.

And doing that requires empathy not just for every person who has died and will die from violent acts, but also having empathy for the people committing those acts. You can’t figure out why they’re doing what they’re doing and how to make it less frequent unless you have empathy. Which is honestly not where I expected to land. I expected to land on “some people don’t deserve your empathy”. And that’s just not how I feel. I feel like everyone deserves empathy and you owe it to yourself to provide empathy to everyone you can. But that doesn’t mean you have to like them.

Because I’ll be real with you, it’s sad that Charlie is dead for all the reasons that we’ve talked about and for all the reasons that everyone on the internet said. But it’s also sad that he’s not going to get to see us make a more empathetic world that he would have thought was soft and terrible. I’d much rather have seen him suffer by having his ideology destroyed by brave people standing up against his odious and contemptuous “ideals” than to see him suffer at the hands of yet another fucking gun.