Utilizing Sympathy and Empathy in Historical Analysis
Part Three
For
anyone who disagrees, the burden of history with the hard facts delineated
above challenges you to consider if you could have chosen realistically to
assume custody of those seven grandchildren.
Switch places with the maternal grandmother and genuinely ascertain
whether you could have assumed the responsibility of eleven children in your
early sixties. If you were confronted
with a similar and contemporary dilemma, would you be able to say “Yes?” If you are a spouse and parent, whether you
agree with the maternal grandmother’s decision, presumably you can sympathize
if not empathize with her. In November
1967, life’s complexities coerce you in deciding whether you will double the
size of your family without any additional resources. These emotionally intense conditions are
compounded by your oldest daughter’s incapacities; you wonder whether you are
abandoning these children a second time.
Will they hate your daughter and you?
Pragmatically
and practically, does it make sense to assume an obligation that you are unsure
whether you can meet it? The social and
cultural milieu in which you were reared and reside insist that you have
unconditional faith in Almighty God who will provide faithfully were you to say
“Yes.” However, you must wrestle with
the inflexible and wooden facts which are not in your favor. You sense your son-in-law is constitutionally
incapable of returning to assume custody of the children as he fervently
declares he will. If you say “Yes,” you
are committing the balance of your natural life to rearing another family
beginning in your sixties. Will anyone
really understand the authenticity of your answer?
Heretofore,
one of the seven grandchildren actually assumed his maternal grandmother was as
indifferent to the pain and suffering of his siblings and him. If asked, he venomously quipped, “She didn’t
give a damn about us either.”
Conversely, with forty five years of distance from the experience inclusive
of seventeen years of marriage and fourteen years as a parent of two children,
he presently feels substantial sympathy and empathy towards his maternal
grandmother. As he emotionally detaches
from his unrequited personal pain and depersonalizes the experience through the
prism of marriage and fatherhood, he sympathizes and even empathizes with his
maternal grandmother. He realizes he
probably would have done exactly what she did.
If challenged with a parallel situation today, he does not know if he
could assume such a tremendous responsibility albeit he possesses a stalwart
faith in God’s unquestionable faithfulness.
The
preceding personal interlude instructs students of history to lessen the
forthrightness and ferocity of their analyses of past events. Like the grandson who arrogantly judged his
maternal grandmother over the course of many years, contemporary students of
history superfluously believe in their moral superiority when compared with any
litany of historical crimes and scandals.
Each subsequent generation deludes itself into believing they would have
made more just and moral decisions than their forebears. Ponder the historical judgments of future
generations when they evaluate the use of economic resources, technology,
science, the sole superpower status of the United States and her increasingly
religious, racial, ethnic and cultural pluralism in the second half of the
twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first century. The “Iron Curtain” fell decisively and
irretrievably in 1990. Communism failed
without question as a means of maintaining a state and creating flourishing
society in which the average citizen enjoys life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. Rather than foster
relationships with Middle Eastern countries and Third World nations that furthered
democracy and individual freedoms, the United States arguably sought economic
and cultural imperialism as she strove for control of oil reserves and an
unfair advantage in the global market.
Domestically, the last decade of the twentieth century, “The Clinton
Years,” was the most prosperous era in human history as no other people have
enjoyed the riches and blessings of money, technology, science and political
power relative to their historical context.
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