TOMA: Top-of-Mind Awareness
We must replace cruel policies with caring policies by making empathy top-of-mind. Mercy requires empathy.
Welcome back, subscribers to the Substack of Empathy Surplus Network USA.
TOMA stands for top-of-mind awareness. I’m in my second week of recovery from hip replacement surgery, and my TOMA is my gratitude for my numerous caregivers, including my surgeon, nurses, therapists, family members, and friends, who focused on speeding my recovery. I recently shared this on the Empathy Surplus Zoom Forum chat, and a new member asked a great question.
“Chuck,” they asked, “when you say you are following your caregivers' orders, I see you modeling acceptance of their care. Is that the same as accepting their empathy? My question/comment is sincere. An offer of empathy does not mean it can be received. Caring policies are falling on deaf ears, whereas cruel policies are being lapped up.”
A public plea for mercy takes courageous empathy.
When you care for people you don’t know, you want them to be protected from harm so they can live fulfilling lives and be treated fairly. The cultural context of this question is that it came two days after the inauguration of a felon and rapist to be POTUS. Two images come to mind from this question. DC Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde pleading from the pulpit of the National Cathedral for mercy directly to felon and rapist POTUS sitting on the front row at the Prayers for the Nation Service. Her pleas fell on the deaf ears of felon and rapist POTUS, who referred to her as a nasty woman that evening on social media and demanded an apology.
The other image this questioner conjured up for me was of lapdogs of felon and rapist POTUS. The Queen of England had her corgies. The felon and rapist POTUS has his Senate lapdogs, who lapped up his Senate nomination for Secretary of Defense of a man challenged with drug addiction, whose mother called an abuser of women.
Still, we persist in leading with stated empathy.
However, my questioner has forgotten that the caring policy debate is public. Top-of-mind awareness for caring policies is the job of Empathy Surplus stakeholders and all caring Americans. Those who want caring policies must publicly persist in centralizing empathy to encourage those who, as the scriptures say, have “ears to hear.” Bishop Budde’s call for mercy is a call to exercise empathy and can happen at the local level by those rejecting the cruelty of felon and rapist POTUS.
Remember George Lakoff’s words,1 “98 percent of what our brains are doing is below the level of consciousness. As a result,” Lakoff continues, “we may not know all, or even most, of what in our brains determines our deepest moral, social, and political beliefs. And yet we act based on those largely unconscious beliefs.”
Linking the rule of law to stated empathy is the citizen’s job.
The job of effective, caring citizens is to make conscious in public debate our duty to care for everyone with the rule of law of the governed, not by dictatorial decree.
#GoEmpathySurplus
Lakoff, George, Don’t Think of an Elephant, Introduction: Reframing IS Social Change, 2014, Chelsea Green, Vermont