In writing about the need to walk in another person’s shoes, Barack Obama makes this statement:I am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush’s eyes, no matter how much I may disagree with him.
That’s what empathy does—it calls us all to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor.
We are all shaken out of our complacency.
We are all forced beyond our limited vision.
No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.
Source: Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (Edinburgh, London, New York, Melbourne: Canongate, 2007), 68.
A review of this book is published at Reviewing Books and Movies.
Dr Geoff Pound
Image: “I am obligated to try to see the world through George Bush’s eyes, no matter how much I may disagree with him.”