Empathy

I choose the side of the innocent victims — all of them.

~Two Orphans~

It is difficult to resist the allure of tribalism. But one who is free of such attachments thanks to an absence of kin, an alienation from the warm physical embrace of any extended family, is untethered. And in that state of aloneness, the heart is then open to empathy for those of opposing tribes.

For myself, with my mother and father dead, all aunts and uncles gone, grandparents gone before my birth (save for one, who died when I was five), and cousins scattered across the country, most of us mere acquaintances to each other, I am in essence an orphan.

And when this orphan, this abandoned child, meets the dark, haunted gaze of an orphaned Palestinian girl, standing alone in the bombed-out street in Gaza, her parents the latest victims of the year-long siege, there is a flicker of understanding between them, thousands of miles away, through a computer screen.

It does not matter that the two young girls are of different cultures, with their people engaged in an existential battle with seemingly no end. In practical terms, they are both alone in the universe.

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