At first, there was just me and my patients, yet I couldn't help noticing that there were people as close as the next block in neighboring, politically demarcated "service areas" who, trapped in an emergency, were dying needlessly because they received inadequate care. I found myself expanding my reach by influencing others in the towns nearby to support advanced medical care. I landed smack in the middle of such larger issues as status, economics, and race, and the venue to deal with those things was politics. As each year went by, I found myself taking larger stands amidst broader audiences in an attempt to standardize higher levels of emergency care.

In the process, I became more distant from the immediacy of the moment with my patients as I became more and more absorbed and consumed by moving masses of others towards my perception of a Greater Good. After twelve years, I burned out--not on working on the edge of life and death, but on the politics. I accomplished a lot, but I lost something important, too: the time and presence in the moment to sit quietly with a person in pain and help them to feel not so alone.

It was after this period of my life that I started to understand the difference between causes and people, and how, apathetic to a cause, I could still change the world a person at a time. How? I came to understand that destructiveness to us, other people, or the environment was a by-product of lack of empathy coupled with lack of education. Without empathy, however, all the education in the world means nothing.

The path that I took (or that took me, it's hard to tell) was in finding ways to ignite empathy in others. That could only be done person to person. The first individual to work on was myself. And the pathway to accomplish this was to learn to open my heart. An interesting by-product of opening one’s heart is that it becomes all-inclusive, and tolerant of what boils down to the struggle of being human. As the cartoon character Pogo says, “We have met the enemy and he is us!”