Sociological Mindfulness

             In the video we watched in class a man was trying to teach empathy. Although we are usually taught to “put ourselves in someone else’s shoes” at a very young age, this was on a much larger scale. He used intense examples like the poverty suffered by Americans when the Chinese were profiting off of the American coal. He then reversed the situation to feel empathy for the poverty suffered in the Middle East because Americans are taking the foreign oil.

                It’s pretty amazing how blinded most Americans are to what is actually going on in the world. The media plays us up so much and releases stories of all the good things we are doing in other parts of the world. From our sociological perspective we are heroes. We think that all we do is help other people in other countries and we’re almost doing them charity work. Most of them don’t see it that way. When you put yourself in their shoes, you see we suddenly become the villains. We take their freedom and safety, steal their recourses, crush their beliefs and religious freedom, fill them with fear, and when they stand up against us, we kill them. Much like the Chinese did to us, but instead of learning from it, we inflict it upon others.

                Sociological mindfulness is so important to have a functioning society. You have to be aware of how your actions are imprinting the world around you. Whether it’s something small like deciding to hand a dollar to a homeless person on the side of the road or something much larger like starting your own charity organization, having the ability to understand the struggles of others and make a difference can impact many lives.

                When I think about an example of when I have been sociologically mindful, one specifically sticks out to me. It was three years ago, I was on vacation in Indiana like I do every summer. I was staying in a pretty large town where my aunt lives, that has a large population of homeless people. My aunts church does a breakfast feed for the homeless every Sunday before church. My aunt helps out every week and they were short staffed one Sunday, so my aunt asked me to help out. I am not going to lie, I was scared. I had very little interaction with homeless people because of the area we come from. I didn’t know what to think about them, and did I really want to get up at 6am on my vacation and go feed a bunch of dirty homeless people? I thought about it for a while and I managed to put myself in their shoes, (hypothetically speaking because a lot of them didn’t have shoes). I thought about if I was a homeless person at that breakfast, looking forward to that one descent meal I might get all week, how much I would appreciate every single person helping out with that breakfast, so I went. I was scared at first because I didn’t exactly know what to expect, but soon I was overwhelmed by the manners and the appreciation most of them had. I met so many amazing people with compelling stories. Needless to say, I go back every year.