For this next post on my blog, I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Bonding.” In this episode, a young boy named Jeremy, who lost his father 5 years prior, loses his mother. She died on an exploration trip to an unknown plant. Worf, having led the expedition, felt responsible for the boy and by the end of the episode accepted him into his family and bonding them together forever. Even in the world of today, not all people would feel this sort of compassion and responsibility that Worf demonstrated. It is a known tactic that soldiers in the army are told to look at their enemies as something less than human. This is done to help alleviate a sense of guilt for killing them. If they are viewed as something less than human, then perhaps they do not deserve sympathy or forgiveness.
But then again some people have shown this trait in the past. If you consider the time when the south and north were separated and the Underground Railroad was taking place, some white people in the south were willing to risk their freedom to help slaves make it to the free North. So it is not as though the entire human race lacks the ability to help out another in their time of need, but rather some of us have not quite reached that point yet. Empathy is a peculiar thing and although not everyone shows it, I believe that everyone is capable of expressing it.
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