Empathy was a pillar of my elementary education. The concept wove throughout my classes, from the fictional cautionary tales during read-alouds on the rug to the lived experiences of injustice I learned about in history lessons. We were taught to imagine ourselves in someone else’s place.
In a place like Palo Alto, where a bubble of privilege protects us from many of the immediate repercussions of national government decisions, empathy is what drives us to continue caring — to oppose something happening beyond the bubble because we are morally against the cruel treatment of other human beings. The past year of Donald Trump’s second presidential term has felt like a test of this deeply ingrained value that serves as a guiding hand in our moral compass. Do we care about injustice even when it is not affecting us directly?
Such a question has become harder to ignore as political campaigns increasingly lean openly on prejudice, when rhetoric targets entire communities and when politicians normalize justifying human rights violations. Political opinions, then, are reflective of more than just the policies you support; they establish what morals you align with and where you stand in instances that threaten life and liberty.
Online, the stakes are constant, with social media as one of the most formidable enemies of empathy. More and more people document and post the government’s crimes against citizens. Video footage of the murders of innocent people like Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti spreads like wildfire. Inevitably, violence has become part of scrolling, risking blending into the background. With that constant exposure, social media conditions an emerging desensitization to the inhumane. But just because something appears to be overwhelmingly present and “normal,” that does not mean it is justified. Battling this war on empathy requires active efforts to pause. To promote independent formation of opinion, based not on what the TikTok comment section thinks or what parents or friends think is okay, but on what we actually believe about what we have just witnessed. Only through an empathetic lens can we truly realize the moral weight of it all, recognizing the human cost behind each clip.
Social media has also largely amplified political platforms’ worst of the worst: the loudest voices, riddled with bigotry, representing the popular or even “correct” opinion. Volume and repetition begin to masquerade as consensus. This only affirms the importance of developing personal viewpoints, especially because in politics, the loudest voice in the room is often using volume to compensate for the lack of moral reason within their stance. Tapping into our empathy is vital in filtering out all of this noise and realizing that, having reached a point where the very lives of human beings are put up for debate, the “popular” opinion should not factor into determining what is right.
It may seem tempting to take the easy way out. “I’m not political” is a convenient refuge that many fall back on. But in the current era of extrajudicial killings and tearing families apart, political apathy equates to moral apathy. This only helps maintain the status quo: a conditioned indifference to denying people basic rights and dignity. While Palo Alto may appear to have some special sort of immunity to the consequences of national tensions, taking a “neutral” stance to dull urgency and avoid confrontational disagreement is still harmful, particularly to those outside of the bubble who cannot afford such an illusion. Voting decisions should not come with leeway for bending the morals you claim to uphold. Tolerance makes you partly responsible for the continuation of what you are supposedly against. In other words, if you are not condemning it, then you are condoning it.
So instead of fleeing from political conversations, face them head-on. Allow empathy to shape your moral awareness and voting choices, because how we think about these issues — what we question, what we excuse, what we defend — will carry over not just to the ballot box on Election Day, but also into the White House, Capitol Hill and millions of lives.
