FARLEY Bridging divides: Why kindness and empathy should transcend our adult differences

Last week, I spent my Friday with my 6-year-old nephew Liam, his mother and his best friend Jaq.

We took a trip to the planetarium in St. Louis to celebrate Liam’s birthday.

Jaq is a sweet boy that I’ve never spent much time with before. But he asks hard questions.

My sister had a miscarriage before Liam was born. Liam knows that he had a sister named Jayna and she’s in Heaven now.

Jaq, with the innocence of a child, wanted to know why, after asking if Liam had any brothers and sisters and hearing about Jayna. Because God wanted her to be one of his angels, my sister said.

Why? Jaq asked, to every answer she had.

Trying to explain life’s hard questions to a 6-year-old while navigating afternoon traffic in St. Louis is no easy feat.

I finally responded to one of his questions, “That’s one of life’s mysteries we’re still trying to understand.”

Which became my go-to when my sister and I ran out of responses to questions like, “Why are there poor people standing in the snow at the intersection?”

Life is hard to understand. None of us have all of the answers.

We look for those answers in different places. In the wisdom of our parents, the support of our friends, the strength of our communities, and often in our faith.

Faith and politics are two topics we’re commonly told to avoid discussing. As much as they can define who are, probably because of how they define us, these topics are minefields. They lead to hurt feelings and unintended misunderstandings.

Sometimes we become so entrenched in, “I’m right and they’re wrong,” that it feels like we’re on opposite sides of deep chasm impossible to cross.

But we aren’t. Not really. Not unless we choose to be.

Children have a special place in our hearts. We give them our time, our patience and our protection, even when they’re strangers to us.

That fades as they grow up and become adults. We have less patience with the stranger in line in front of us at the store, or in the car beside us in traffic. We have expectations for adults, and that’s as it should be. Generally, we all have to grow up and learn to manage our own lives.

But does that absolve us of the responsibility to show kindness and empathy to those whose paths we cross?

Does my lifestyle, my faith, my nationality, my economic status, my race, my gender or any other characteristic I posses versus theirs give me permission to infringe upon their basic human rights?

What if the positions were reversed and they had the power to make those choices for me? What action would I think it fair for them to take?

History is littered with examples of this. And they’re all bad. They’re all more then bad, more than I have words to describe.

Nothing good has ever come of drawing a line in the sand and saying the people on this side have certain rights and the people on that side don’t.

When we’re trying to decide what basic rights our society is going to ascribe to everyone, the deciding factor cannot be faith, nationality, economic status, race, gender, lifestyle or anything else that we perceive as dividing us.

That is not the country we want. I know it isn’t, not if we’re being honest with ourselves.