by Gene Weisskopf

1918 marked the end of
The War to End All Wars.
And yet, 20 years later,
The War to End All Wars
Had to be renamed with a Roman numeral I,
As a new global war took on the name Second.
And since that time,
If there were a next Great War,
It would be named with a III.
But this war, with its nuclear heart, might truly be
The War to End All Wars,
The war that would finally and forever bring
Peace on Earth

I wrote this free-verse poem back in 2018, inspired by the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War. Or maybe it was also triggered by yet another headline warning of possible nuclear conflagration. But I’ve been assaulted by such headlines since the day I was born in 1950. I grew up under the looming shadow of nuclear proliferation, when one headline after another expanded the terrifying dimensions of the threat: fusion (hydrogen) bombs hundreds of times larger than the Nagasaki bomb, ICBMs that can carry a bomb halfway around the world in minutes not hours, missile-launching submarines that lurk off our shores, missiles carrying multiple warheads, and on and on with seemingly no end.

These were not distant threats. I lived 15 miles south of San Francisco, and virtually any point in the SF Bay Area would make a suitable target for an enemy attack. Just to emphasize that, my elementary school practiced fire drills, earthquake drills, and also “air raid drills.” But even that quaint name didn’t blunt the potential threat. For example, our school rooms had windowed walls on the north side, and as part of the air raid drill, we would swing each window open, so that an ensuing blast would not shatter those dozens of windows into the room. And of course, we would assume some sort of duck-and-cover position, I think under our desks. Even as a kid, I knew this exercise would mostly be one of futility, given what I’d already learned about nuclear weapons.

Then came the fall of 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis. I was in the sixth grade, still in that same elementary school. I retain vivid memories of walking home from school that afternoon and finding my mother carrying some boxes of food and water down into our basement. She wasn’t panicked, she was simply following sound advice for what might be needed in the coming days. On the other hand, I’m sure she was horribly scared, but simply maintained a cool demeanor so as not to further scare her 12-year-old son.

But it was already too late. Simply seeing my mother caching supplies in our basement for a looming nuclear war was all I had to see, and that image has been ingrained in my psyche for the past 60 years. The threat has never truly gone away and, in fact, has gotten either worse or a little better, depending on the whims of world history and whoever happened to be at the helm of our country. I’m still grateful that John Kennedy was our president during that terrifying time, and I refuse to imagine what a similar crisis would be like under a president who had no grounding in governance and no concern for the citizens of our country or any other.

So, I’m not sure what looming threat spurred me to write that poem about the war to end all wars. But something struck a nerve that opened my memories yet again to October 1962, currently reinforced by the threat of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine being the war to end all wars by going nuclear.

Gene Weisskopf is vice chairman of World Citizens for Peace. His article was published in PeaceMeal, May/June/July 2022.

Herb Cromwell
Baltimore Sun, June 25, 2021

    “Thank you for seeing me
     I feel so less lonely
     Thank you for getting me
     I’m healed by your empathy”

– Alanis Morissette, “Empathy”

A dictionary definition of empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It’s not the same as sympathy. As memoirist Rebecca O’Donnell puts it, “Empathy is walking a mile in somebody else’s moccasins. Sympathy is being sorry their feet hurt.”

If Americans seem less empathetic that they used to be, the scientific community says that feeling has validity. A 2010 University of Michigan study found that college students then were 40% less empathetic than their counterparts of 1980s and ’90s, as measured by standardized tests of this personality trait. And it seems to have only gotten worse since then.

In 2011, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked presidential candidate Ron Paul what should happen to a 30-year old man who chose not to buy health insurance and then became seriously ill. “Are you saying society should just let him die?” Mr. Blitzer asked. The debate crowd “erupted in cheers and whoops of ‘Yeah,’” Slate reported.

Roughly a decade later, in September 2020, after the shooting of two Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies, a crowd gathered outside the treating hospital shouting “we hope they die” as they tried to block the hospital’s emergency exits, according to the Los Angeles Times. That same month, “The U.S. has an Empathy Deficit” was the headline of an opinion piece in the September 2020 Scientific American.

In America today, immigrants are demonized. Asian Americans are assaulted. Capitol police are beaten with flagpoles. Unarmed African Americans are shot and suffocated by police. Votes are suppressed. Mass shootings take lives regularly.

Even mask wearing amid COVID-19 illustrates our empathy problem. The message “I wear a mask to protect you, you wear a mask to protect me” did not resonate with millions of Americans; neither did the social value of vaccinations. Today’s notion of individual freedom has little room for empathy.

“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism,” wrote philosopher Hannah Arendt.

So, what can we do to boost our collective empathy level? Empathy — or lack of it — is partially hardwired: A 2018 University of Cambridge study found that 10% of differences in humans’ ability to empathize can be attributed to genetic variations. But that means 90% is explained by non-genetic factors such as socialization and education. That suggests empathy can be taught.

Stanford neuroscientist Jamil Zaki confirms this in his book “The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World.” The book shares research, including experiments from his own lab, showing that empathy can be strengthened through effort.

Author Roman Krznaric, in “Empathy: Why it Matters and How to Get It,” argues that empathy should be taught at a young age. He notes that half of the children who participated in Roots of Empathy, a Canadian nonprofit that teaches school-age children to empathize with each other, were less likely to fight than they were prior to the program.

Here’s one more idea: Administer an empathy test to every candidate for public office.

Prior to filing, every candidate would be required to listen to the old song “I’ll Be Seeing You” by Billie Holiday. They would be asked to imagine a G.I. in a foxhole dreaming about his wife or girlfriend back home, and a young woman stateside wondering if her love would make it back. If by the last line “I’ll be looking at the moon, but I’ll be seeing you” there’s not a tear in the candidate’s eye, he or she wouldn’t be allowed to run. We’d then know that our elected officials had hearts at least capable of empathy.

Henry David Thoreau may have said it best: “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?”

Steve Martin had a less noble take: “Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes,” he reportedly said. “That way, when you do criticize him, you’ll be a mile away — and have his shoes.”

But at least you will have done the walk. And the journey of a thousand miles — and to empathy — begins with a single step.

– PeaceMeal, July/August 2021

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)