What strikes me about these two pieces is their approach to empathy, with Chen’s focusing on the perspective of a brainwashed church member coming to the realization of the faults that were involved with the church through emphasizing. While Jamison’s focused on the route of empathy and believing or rather listening to the stories of people who suffered from a controversial disease.
What’s interesting about the two of them is through getting to know people, they both come out with different mindsets at the end of each story that involves empathy along the way.
Chen’s story focused on Megan Phelps-Roper, who had previously been apart of the Westboro Baptist Church, coming to terms with the realization of the hate that was taught in this church. Through empathy she experiences herself, and through the empathy of others, she allows herself to come to the realization of the church’s wrongdoings. One major turning point in her conversion had been her Twitter interactions with both David Abitol and C.G. as she seems to understand their humanity and becomes friendly with them, falling into a friendship that allows her to start a change in her views. At one point she even goes out and buys “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Judaism,” (Chen, 83) in hopes of going more towards a more complete understanding towards the world. Although slow, it does start her on the path towards change that she eventually makes.
With Jamison, her idea of empathy is brought out through her trip to a Morgellons’s convention in which she comes to better understand the disease and comes to practice empathy with some of the people attending. At one point mentioning how she herself could relate to them by expressing how she felt “a wrongness in my being that I could never pin or name, so I found things to pin it to: my body, my thighs, my face. This resonance is part of what compels me about Morgellons: it offers a shape for what I’ve often felt, a container or christening for a certain species of unease.” (Jamison, 226) Also empathizing with them after she herself went through a traumatic experience with a botfly in which she was looked down upon by the doctors, thinking she was crazy. Although as she found out, what had happened to her had been very real, which counters from the experiences that she had been told at the conference. Through her experiences, she emphasizes with them to the point where she has some small understanding of what they’re going through.
Both works weave empathy into their narrative, each in their own specific way. But the use of empathy allows for both the featured people in these pieces to allow for something in their way of thinking to change. They each come to a conclusion at the end of their piece that they’ve changed how they view the topic at hand in each article which highlights the power that empathy holds.
