How compassion could save your strained relationships Betty Hart
Transcriber:
I am unabashedly a daddy’s girl.
My daddy is the first person
to have told me that I was beautiful.
He often told me that he loved me,
and he was one of my favorite
people in the entire world,
which was why it was really challenging
to discover that we had
a deep ideological divide
that was so sincere and so deep
that caused me to not talk
to him for 10 years.
Before the term was coined,
I canceled my father.
In the last few years,
cancel culture has of course
come into great prominence.
It’s existed throughout time,
but cancel culture in the bigger society
is when a person in prominence
says or does something
that we, the people, disagree with,
and the decision is made
to make them persona non grata.
They are done.
They are not to be revered.
They are not to be
a part of our world anymore.
And that is in the public realm.
I’m going to talk to you today
about the private realm.
When we choose to cancel
the people in our circle,
the people in our core,
the people who love us and who we love,
and it has been mutually beneficial,
but due to a deep
and sincere ideological divide,
we make the decision
to cancel them out of our lives.
I want to suggest that
cancel culture needs to change,
and instead we need to
move to compassion culture.
But before I go there,
let me tell you
two of the premises that exist
when we indulge in cancel culture.
One, we have to believe that we’re right.
A hundred percent,
no possibility of being wrong.
And two, the other person,
the person we’re going to cancel,
clearly does not have the ability
to change, to grow, to develop.
Obviously, both of these are problematic
because sometimes we’re not right.
I don’t know about you,
but there have been times in my life
when I knew beyond
a shadow of a doubt that I was right
only to discover that I was wrong,
badly wrong, completely missed the mark.
So if it could happen to me
and perhaps it’s happened to you,
perhaps it could happen to others.
The second is a little
even more challenging
because I know that
I’ve changed over the years.
Haven’t we all?
Though the core parts of Betty
have pretty much stayed the same,
there have been key elements
that have changed drastically.
The Betty of eight years old was
not the same as the Betty of 18,
which was not the same as 28,
which was not the same as 38.
I’ve changed.
And if I’m able to change,
shouldn’t I extend grace
to believe that others can change too?
So what should we do?
Instead of canceling people,
we should use the tool called compassion.
I find the definition of compassion
is a fascinating one.
And it’s not one
that I hear people talk about.
Compassion means to suffer with someone.
To suffer alongside them.
Imagine.
When someone, say, Grandpa,
says that thing
that’s caused you to decide
he’s no longer invited to Thanksgiving,
what if instead we chose
to suffer alongside him?
We decided that our love
was so big, so deep, so strong
that we were willing to suffer,
even when it could be potentially painful.
Now let’s be clear.
I am not denying anyone’s right
to cancel anyone else.
What I’m suggesting is that
maybe that’s not the best way.
When we think about the situation
with Grandpa at Thanksgiving,
if we choose to cancel him,
we are no longer in proximity to him.
Not only do we not get to hear
his point of view,
we don’t get to share ours.
What if we’re the only person,
because of our deep connection and love
and affection for our grandfather –
and substitute anyone you choose.
What if we’re the ones
to plant seeds of change,
seeds of influence,
seeds of difference.
Now, to be fair,
I cannot promise you
that just because you plant the seed,
that it will get water,
that it’ll get any sunlight
or even a little fertilizer.
But what I can tell you
is that if you don’t plant it,
who will?
I find it interesting,
this idea of suffering alongside someone.
It means that we are choosing
to value the totality of the person
rather than one particular aspect,
like a framework or a mindset
or a belief system.
We’re choosing to believe
that the entire person is more valuable
than any of the individual parts.
And I found an amazing duo
who demonstrated this beautifully.
Perhaps you’ve heard of them.
The late justices
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia
were close, close friends.
And they were completely divided
in terms of belief systems.
In fact, Antonin Scalia once said,
“What’s not to like,
other than her thoughts on the law.”
He believed she was wrong.
She believed he was wrong.
They did not shift
in that point of view whatsoever.
And yet they had tea together every week,
and every New Year’s Eve,
they spent it together
with their families.
They went on family vacations together.
They chose to suffer
with each other rather
than to cancel each other.
Their love and respect for each other
continued to grow,
even though they never saw eye to eye.
I imagine that curiosity
might be a part of that.
That if we choose to be curious
about that which is different,
we might discover something along the way.
After all, if we are who we are
because of our lived experiences,
isn’t that true for someone else?
And have we ever decided
to use that tool of empathy,
of walking a mile or so
in someone else’s shoes
to really discover the context
for why they believe what they believe?
Now, by now you’re probably saying,
“Yeah, OK, Betty, this sounds good.
But what about you?
What about you and your dad?”
It’s a fair question.
After 10 years of not talking to my dad,
I picked up the phone one day,
called him and said,
“I bet if it were up to you,
you’d probably go back in time
and change some things.
I know I would.
But since we can’t,
how about we start again?”
And he said,
“Yes, because I love you.
I always have. And I always will.”
I am so grateful that I made that call
because there was no way for me to know
that a few years later
my dad would develop Alzheimer’s.
And a few years after that he would die.
And we never saw eye to eye
about the thing that divided us,
ever.
But our love continued.
It continued through those 10 years
when we didn’t speak
and it continued in the six years after.
So I am encouraging us
to become a society of people
that choose compassion over canceling.
I’m asking us to consider
that curiosity might be a better practice.
That we might choose empathy,
that we might choose
to have a love that is so deep, so wide,
so strong that it can surpass differences.
Why are we so scared
of differences anyway?
I also want us to be a people
that plant seeds,
seeds of change, seeds of influence,
seeds of diversity.
Again, I cannot promise
to you or anyone else
that planting that seed
is going to make a difference.
But what if it does?
I am the sum of who I am
because of everything
that I’ve been exposed to.
My mind has changed over the years
and grown because of the people
in my life who planted seeds in me,
some that I saw and some that I didn’t.
So wouldn’t it be great
if instead of having a cancel culture
we create a compassion culture
where we are willing to suffer
alongside the ones we love,
because we love them.
And can’t we become
a community that plants seeds?
After all, if we don’t, who will?
Thank you.