Empathy Surplus Network USA is grateful for you, our readers!
Thank you for your commitment to pro-empathy freedom, especially Mr. Hutto, my Key Club Advisor.
Happy Thanksgiving to Pro-Empathy Freedom Voters are the Solution subscribers. Our 3rd-Trimester Zoom forums are recessed till 2024. We focused on George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Please consider helping our Zoom forum members choose what we’ll study in 2024 with this rank-choice ballot of Lakoff and non-Lakoff books.
Sixty years ago today, I was 14 years old. I was a 9th grader at H.V. Cooper High School, Vicksburg, Mississippi. My parents worked for the US Corps of Engineers and were from Illinois and Oklahoma. Dad had taken a job with Sun Oil after graduating from Oklahoma University’s Geological Engineering School, funded by the GI Bill. Dad was a World War II veteran of our Japanese occupation after we dropped the two big ones. My classmates would tease me for saying H.V. COOper instead of H.V. cuPER High School.
Our communities shape children to be nurturers of democracy or bullies of autocracy. Mr. Hutto, the Kiwanis Key Club advisor, shaped my life. It was a Friday. I was at lunch with my fellow students when the announcement came over the intercom something like:
Attention. Attention. Boys and girls. Teachers and Staff. President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas, Texas. Our President is dead.
At first, there was stunned silence. But then a group of students started cheering and dancing for joy. I felt sick. The few seconds their cheering ensued seemed like hours until Mr. Hutto stepped up onto a cafeteria table where some dancing was taking place.
Mr. Hutto was weeping.
The only other man I had seen cry was my father. He and I had taken my mother to the local hospital psych ward earlier that Summer. Mom and the family were challenged by her bipolar and substance disorders. When we returned to the car in the hospital parking lot, Dad just wept and heaved as he wept. I was stunned. I remember trying to scoot over and hold him on the front seat of our 1959 green Chevy Impala.
Weeping was what Mr. Hutto was doing. As he stood on the cafeteria table weeping, the cheering and dancing stopped. I’m sure he said something, but I don’t remember what he said. But that’s the year, my 9th grade year, when I joined the Key Club in Mississippi. So, if you’re a Kiwanian, I know who you are. You are supposed to be committed to social responsibility. Your mission is to shape children’s lives every day. Your mission is to be strong nurturers to our community’s children. You are supposed to show empathy because that’s what Mr. Hutto did.
I went off to college at Mississippi State and two years later was married at the age of 20. There was no Kiwanis Club in West Point, Mississippi. But my adult mentors were Rotarians. Several were on the board of a daycare center for black children and invited Mary Tom and me to serve on that board.
First licensed daycare center for children in Mississippi
Thanks to those Rotarians and a former young Key Club member, that daycare center became the first licensed center for black children in the State of Mississippi. My wife was the City Editor of the newspaper and wrote all about it, along with the story of the local KKK clan, which bombed the local courthouse to frame the black director of the daycare center who was running for Mayor. They were trying to bully us to stop showing empathy to people they didn’t believe were worthy of empathy.
Mississippi’s Secret Police
For showing that empathy, my wife and others were put on what was then Mississippi’s Secret Police watch list. Our phone was tapped. Fast forward fifty years, and Kiwanis are still showing courageous empathy on behalf of the community’s children. Our community can’t be free and prosperous without a commitment to empathy for and responsibility to humanity. Empathy is the soul of democracy, nurturing families, public education, and effective government. And our children learn deep empathy from civil society organizations like Kiwanis, Rotary, and Lions.
When US Republicans and Democrats dreamed of human rights as “progressive measures.”
There was a time when US Republicans and Democrats both dreamed of human rights as “progressive measures.”1 In 1945, President Harry Truman, a Democrat, appointed Vermont Senator Warren Austin, a Republican and a Rotarian, to be US Ambassador to the United Nations Conference on Organization in San Francisco. Truman’s Secretary of State recruited several Rotarians and Lions Club members to serve as consultants to the delegation that met in San Francisco to write the Charter. The American delegation of civic groups contributed two important items to the Charter.
Rotarians and Lions gave themselves a seat at the UN Table with the Economic and Social Council.
First, they changed the opening sentence of the UN Charter from “We the Member States” to “We the People of the United Nations.” And, second they created the UN’s Economic and Social Council, where 80 percent of the work gets done. Three years later, in 1948, the year of my birth, America’s first UN Ambassador, Warren Austin, cast America’s YES vote while Russia abstained, for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Next month, on December 10th, is the 75th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Empathy Surplus Network USA is a 501c3 membership-driven human rights empathy education collective based on the latest insights of the brain from cognitive scientist, linguist, and progressive activist George Lakoff. We encourage our stakeholders to make human rights empathy for and responsibility to humanity the center of constant public discourse, no matter the human rights issue. On behalf of our trustees, thank you for your readership. Please consider a paid subscription to help us build an empathy surplus in YOUR center of influence.
United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights Preamble Proclamation