Humanity-Empathize

I thought that Jeremy Rifkin's video "The Empathic Civilization" was incredible. If you haven't seen it Click Here. I agree with Ms. Mystrena, the talk-turned animate thing is a pretty cool thing. Though, I'll admit it was hard to listen at some points because the animations were so interesting. I had to watch the video a couple times to be able to understand it. And I still couldn't absorb everything in the video! I thought that the whole part about human beings being soft-wired, with mirror neurons, to observe others feelings and emotions and be able to feel them ourselves was very interesting. It's so true! I also found it intriguing when he was talking about the empathic growth of human. At 2 1/2 years old you can recognize yourself in the mirror. At 8 you learn about life and death and how fragile life is and you begin your existential trip in life. It’s all so interesting and I can only wonder how scientists discover these kinds of things. Rifkin also said that empathy is opposite of utopia because in a utopia there is no suffering. People don't empathize with each other; n one cares for each other. Speaking of caring for each other, this video reminded me of the movie 2012. In 2012, towards the end of the movie when the characters in the ship/ark thing are faced with a decision to begin moving or allowing thousands of other people to board, one guy who wants to allow the people to board says "the moment we stop caring for each other-that's the moment we lose our humanity". Of course they decide to let the people board the ship. This video made me think of that movie scene. Empathy is grounded in the acknowledgement of death and the celebration of life. We all know we’re going to die. We all know life is precious and fragile. Knowing this, humans have amazing ability to care for each other. For example, when the earthquake struck Haiti, within hours the rest of the world knew and shortly after people began to rush to support Haitians in need. I think that we can connect our empathy to a single race writ large in a single biosphere. As humans we've already connected on blood ties, religious ties, and national ties why wouldn't we be able to empathize and connect and share as one people? As humans. We can. We just need to be forgiving and tolerant. We're all people. We have so much in common. And Mr. Taylor would say that our skin color isn't very deep at all. On the inside, we're all the same.