America's "empathy" is quickly becoming the sleeper issue of 2008. Barack Obama:
I'm talking about a moral deficit. I'm talking about an empathy deficit. I'm taking about an inability to recognize ourselves in one another; to understand that we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; that, in the words of Dr. King, we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny. We have an empathy deficit when we're still sending our children down corridors of shame - schools in the forgotten corners of America where the color of your skin still affects the content of your education. We have a deficit when CEOs are making more in ten minutes than some workers make in ten months; when families lose their homes so that lenders make a profit; when mothers can't afford a doctor when their children get sick. We have a deficit in this country when there is Scooter Libby justice for some and Jena justice for others; when our children see nooses hanging from a schoolyard tree today, in the present, in the twenty-first century.
I don't know what Obama means when he says "Jena justice" - he clearly needs to read Charlotte Allen's deconstruction of the Jena incidents. Actually, while he's at it, he should also read Steve Lenzner's new piece on the politics of empathy. For Lenzner, American politics doesn't have too little empathy. It has too much.