One day, the mother of one of his crew approached them and asked to buy crack. Chino recalls: "Seeing the look in my boy's face when his mom came to buy from us ... It wasn't like a look of embarrassment. It was a look of hurt. Sometimes you can see the hurt on somebody"
Chasing the Scream ~ Johann Hari
It hurts to see others in pain. When we see other people suffering, we suffer alongside them; we take on their pain. It's the human reaction. It's why we cringe and look away, or have to force ourselves to watch, when we see someone else being beaten or tortured. It's why even the mere sight of a dead body or human blood causes us to grimace.
Even though we didn't see the pain, we know it was there, and we can imagine the suffering that was felt because we've experienced suffering ourselves. It's why we turn our heads and close our eyes when getting shots or incisions. We know pain.
Pain isn't just a physical phenomenon, though. We do this with emotions too. When we see someone depressed, it lowers our own mood. When we see someone surprised, our hearts leap. When we see someone happy, it raises our spirits. We call it infectious.
We don't just sympathise with others by imagining what they're going through. We empathise and experience alongside them because we know what it's like: we've been there before, in our own ways. Everyone has their unique experiences and reacts to things differently—nothing's ever exactly the same—but people and experiences are similar enough we can draw close to each other and empathise.
The problem is when we can't: when the differences seem so overwhelming they hide the similarities, and we can't relate. We dehumanise the person in front of us by failing to see the humanity and human experience that unites us. We can no longer feel for each other
Now she sees it as a meeting of people who are surrounded by ghosts. As he approaches the car, the police officer has ranged behind him the ghosts of all the cops he has known, "all the funerals he has been to, all the people who've been killed in traffic stops—because it's a lot," she says. And then "there's also the poor black kid" in the car. Sitting in the passenger seat behind him are his ghosts—all of his relatives and friends who have been killed in police raids or vanished into the American prison system.
Neither can see the other side's ghosts. They can only hate
Chino, the one who saw his friend's pain, also felt his father's pain. The pain of the man who raped his mother and caused a traumatic conception. The man who ruined a young woman's life and turned her against her own child. Chino understood his parents' pain because he felt it. They passed it on to him. But, when he looked at his parents, when he thought about them, he saw himself and the unbearable suffering they experienced. He experienced it with them. He felt for them
"In many ways, he was a victim as well," he says carefully. "It's rape ... He had to be a victim at some level in [his] life to have the ability to commit such an atrocious act, or the inability to see it's an atrocious act. I feel more sorry for him than angry