LJ Idol Presents:

can you ever truly have empathy forother people or creatures without filtering it as how it relates to you?

God, yes. Just by witnessing the devastation to that other person, you can see how terrible it is for them and that feeling bleeds right over into you. At least, it does for me. Maybe that's atypical (funerals just destroy me).

OTOH, there are a lot of people who seem to have been raised to be self-entitled and thing only of themselves these days, but that's a larger societal trend. :(

Can I toss a box of hippies into the Community Chest prize list? ;)