Poverty would be no more if everyone simply tried to see themselves in the shoes of the poor. Perhaps if the businessman walking down the street thought to himself, “I wonder how I would feel if I didn’t have a warm bed to come home to every night,” he might spare a few dollars to the homeless man sitting on the street. A lot of people don’t do anything about poverty because they simply don’t understand how hard it really is to come out of. They never put themselves in the shoes of the single mom that’s working three minimum-wage jobs and still can’t afford a graphing calculator for her child for school. The same goes for hunger. If your average upper class America thought about how they would feel if there wasn’t a supermarket with safe food just down the street, they might consider donating money to a charity that could fix that instead of buying themselves the new iPhone that isn’t all that much different than the old iPhone. If apathy didn’t exist, these things wouldn’t be a problem.
Another thing that wouldn’t be a problem if people simply had more empathy is war. This is very simple, really. If those that are waging war for any reason simply thought of the implications of that war on all of the people in the world, they’d certainly second-guess themselves. If they pictured their family being afraid to fall asleep at night because they are listening to the fighting in the streets, they might decide that a compromise is a better way to go. If they saw their son or daughter going to fight with no guarantee of coming back, they may decide that it isn’t worth it. A little less apathy and a little more empathy would do the trick for all of these people.
How can we make people