Amidst the ashes left by the catastrophic Lahaina fires, the world measures the dimensions of the disaster. But even the word “catastrophe” seems insensitive to the real, incalculable dimension of horror.
Harrowing stories emerge from survivors, including those who barely survived with the skin on their backs. And then there are stories we will never hear from those who perished. Unimaginable pain. Unspeakable horror.
In any disaster, the best and the worst of human tendencies emerge. Stories of bravery and selflessness of those who help others in the heat of fires, even risking their own lives, to help even strangers. Consolatory donated goods from afar. Quick housing placements. Perhaps most important, the care and love for each other, the accompaniment of being present with others.
Naturally, people are trying to figure out why this tragedy happened, asking questions and demanding answers: the wind, the water, the grass, the sirens, the power lines, this or that official, the government, the colonialism, economic development, climate change, etc…
Amid the grief, empathy also emerged from around the world. You have a connection to Maui: you came on vacation or your uncle lives there. For some reason you care about Maui. There is a feeling, however fleeting, that the “them” could be “us”. This relativity turns into empathy: we are the same.
With millions of tourists visiting Maui each year, Maui has made many connections with those who have visited as a tourist. Such pedestrian mass tourism, the engine of Hawaii’s economy, has made Maui remarkably accessible to Americans. While relatability is generally good, social media also belittles empathy, vitiated by a superficial, if not futile, quality.
On the other hand, it should be noted that the reverse is also true: lack of relativity leads to lack of empathy. I’m embarrassed to reveal that I barely paid attention to the wildfires in Greece, California or anywhere else. These disasters were ignorable and happened to “other” people. The “them” was not “we”.
But when the messages of consolation from my Greek friends arrived earlier than others, and I read news about the forest fires in Greece and elsewhere, I realized that maybe my Greek friends were related to the Maui wildfires. Thanks to the Maui wildfires, I now clearly see my own human bias for my home state of Hawaii.
Are humans necessarily so petty, that only when you have experienced something do you consider that others might experience something similar? What other forms of human pain have I ignored because I haven’t experienced it?
The wonder but the weirdness of empathy is that we can imagine another’s pain as our own. We can imagine what it’s like to be someone else. We might even have the brave wish to suppress their pain, turning empathy into compassion.
Of course, I can’t know what it was like during those explosive wildfires. It is arrogant to think that I could understand the unknowable pain of others. Yet somehow, through this imaginary relatability, we bring to light the profound ignorance that we are different. Empathy and humility emerge naturally.
As my teacher, Venerable Cheng Yen, once said, “Great kindness though we are not connected, great compassion as one body.” This simple teaching, universal to all religions, is a call to love those who are not connected or even distant from us.
Aloha, too, transcends the narrow confines of our individualistic and selfish concerns to see others as if we were them.
How will we ever recognize that climate change is not happening elsewhere, but is happening to us right now? The world faces multiple disasters simultaneously, including raging wildfires in Canada, not to mention several other disasters throughout the year.
Climate change is causing more frequent and extreme weather patterns, ranging from droughts and wildfires to floods and famine. To say that we live on an interconnected planet, sharing the same house called earth, breathing the same air and drinking the same water, seems both incredibly banal and profound.
If I am desperate to find a silver lining to catastrophe, I pray that with this broad but fleeting empathy, we may awaken to the horror of climate change and bravely tackle the real root causes of our pain.
