Empathy Is Why I Am Still Here

A professor has written a book warning that empathy is destroying society.

That empathy has become dangerous.

I will leave his name outside this piece. He has enough attention already.

What interests me is the idea itself: the belief that caring deeply about other people makes us weak.

I have tried to understand that argument.

Then I look at my life.

I am writing from a country that has survived because millions of strangers decided to care.

Most have never seen Kyiv. They do not know the sound of our nights, and they have never stood beside me at a window after an explosion, waiting to recognize how close it was.

Still, they cared.

They wrote to politicians and sent what they could. So many carried our flag through places whose names I had never heard before.

They had bills to pay and fears waiting every morning, and families of their own depending on them.

I want the professor to say the word weakness in front of them.

When the author wants kindness to look foolish, he reaches for invented animals. A scorpion that stings the frog that carries it across the river, or a rescued snake that bites the farmer who warmed it.

He asks us to look at strangers and expect betrayal.

I have four years of evidence from actual strangers, and the evidence disobeys him.

His fables punish trust. Four years of my life tell another story.

There were mornings when I had almost no hope left. Then a message arrived from Oregon, from Canada, or from a small town I had to search for on a map..

Without the war, we would have passed through each other’s lives as complete strangers. Then they told me that my words had reached them, and what I had lived was no longer mine to carry alone.

Sometimes they had prayed for me, sometimes they only wanted me to know they were still there.

The missiles kept coming.

The messages kept me from feeling completely abandoned beneath them.

A human being can endure fear for a long time. Abandonment is harder.

From a safe distance, suffering may become a budget line, and survival, a political inconvenience.

They call our exhaustion inevitable, other call surrender realistic.

Each word removes a little blood from the picture.

A village can be erased if the calculation sounds reasonable. A country can be pushed toward destruction while powerful men congratulate themselves for remaining rational.

I have no patience for the idea that empathy is the danger.

The greater danger is a mind that can explain suffering perfectly and feels no obligation to stop it.

This journal grew from the human impulse to care.

I have no academic title and no newspaper behind me. What I have is fear and a great deal of self-doubt. I write anyway. There is only me, trying to give words to what I have seen, and my wife helping me with the numbers.

On the other side are people who could easily have remained distant from Ukraine. They chose to come closer. They read, they returned, and some began helping this journal survive.

That is where empathy became more than the subject of these pages, but the way these pages continue to exist.

Some readers who later became friends suggested that I place the articles behind a paywall. They believed limiting access could encourage more people to become paid subscribers and give this work stronger financial support.

They may be right, but I must remember the life I knew before this journal.

For most of my life, I could never have imagined reaching the end of the month with enough left to help keep another person’s words alive. That possibility belonged to a world far from mine.

So I understand how much a subscription asks from someone. I receive each one knowing that a person has chosen to make room for my work inside a life already filled with responsibilities.

How could my words compete with rent, food, or medicine?

I could never ask someone to choose this journal before the things that keep their family safe and their body alive.

Empathy asks us to notice the life behind every decision. I cannot write an article defending empathy and then ignore the reader who needs these words but could not afford them.

So the journal simply stays completely open to everyone.

And although I write from my own window, these pages have always belonged to the country beneath my feet and inside my dreams.

I write so Ukraine remains visible to the world, long after the headlines have reduced our lives to maps and numbers.

For the people outside our borders who are trying to realize what is happening here.

Because every war leaves behind a struggle over memory, and memory follows empathy. People remember the lives they allowed themselves to care about, and we need our lives to be among them.

The argument against empathy has already reached the country you are. A confident voice has explained why caring about people like me costs too much.

When that voice passes without an answer, the calculation moves closer to acceptance.

When you refuse it, you are doing what kept my country alive.

For the men who write against empathy, the people inside their arguments are rarely real.

A suffering child becomes a number to doubt.

A stranger asking for help becomes a scorpion waiting to sting.

I write to you from inside their abstraction.

My windows shake in it.

Ukraine is still here because millions of people allowed our suffering to interrupt their comfort.

I am still here because strangers refused to treat my life as an abstraction.

He can publish all the warnings against empathy he likes.

I have lived through the alternative.

It looks like a world watching people die and congratulating itself for thinking clearly.

—Viktor

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Thank you for reading about Ukraine when so much of the world has moved on. If you have the means, you can become a paid subscriber. Whoever you are, you belong here.

If you are new on this journal, welcome. Start here.

Books by Lyubov and Viktor Kravchuk