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Lilla Watson, an indigenous Aboriginal Australian elder, offers us these wise words of empathy:
If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
This is a powerful description of empathy, but what does it mean for our liberation to be bound up with that of another person? Martin Luther King, Jr., explains it further.
While confined in a jail in Birmingham, Alabama, he wrote:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice every-where. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
The "inescapable network of mutuality" King is referring to is the potential humans have for compassion.
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Doug Good Feather (Think Indigenous: Native American Spirituality for a Modern World)