I think a lot about words: how they fit together, what they mean in a given context, if my usage of them remains accurate even as their definitions change. As Valentine’s Day approaches, empathy and sympathy occupy my mind most.

Empathy is the ability to understand someone else’s pain; you’ve been through what they are going through, and as a result, know exactly what they are dealing with. Sympathy is different. It lacks the personal connection to the event and doesn’t have near as much power. 

That personal connection to an event or issue defines us. What we experience and whom we experience it with shapes our identities. Dick Cheney, for example, one of the staunchest Republicans, supports gay marriage. Why? Last June, his daughter married her longtime partner, Heather, with whom she has two children. But the former vice president has supported gay rights since before her marriage, stating in 2009, “I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish.”

John McCain, again standing in opposition to conventional views of his party, has consistently advocated against the use of torture in military interrogations. McCain also spent more than five years as a prisoner of war, held by the North Vietnamese. 

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio comes from a family of immigrants, and while he hugs the party line tighter than any upcoming Republican, he has constructed his own immigration reform bill, endorsing a path to citizenship. He’s giving the response to President Obama’s State of the Union address — in English and Spanish.

Now there is no reason why individuals such as Cheney and Rubio couldn’t support these contrasting causes without personal involvement. But it remains highly unlikely. Think about the abortion issue. According to a 2012 Gallup poll, men lean pro-life over pro-choice 53 percent to 38 percent, a 15-point margin, while women are roughly equal, voting 46 percent and 44 percent, respectively.

When events touch us personally, it’s hard to not be changed. It’s hard not to get involved, to want what you went through to be the last time anyone goes through that kind of thing again.

Five years ago, on Valentine’s Day, Steven Kazmierczak entered an oceanography classroom at Northern Illinois University and opened fire. He killed five people and injured 21 others before killing himself. The first news reports released merely said there was a shooter on campus. The second reports said he had entered a geology classroom. My dad has taught geology at Northern since I before I was in kindergarten. He had a class that day. Cellphones don’t work very well when everyone calls out, and it was hours before we heard from my dad. And you tell yourself things like “He’s fine” and “It’s a big campus” and then his secretary calls and asks if you’ve heard from him and all of those small comforts go away again.

And then you find out he just locked the door to his classroom and kept teaching through the crisis and you punch him and your mom tells him to call next time and it becomes a kind of joke, the tough professor who kept teaching, and you go on. But any time a shooting occurs or a bomb threat gets called in, those same feelings rush back, regardless if it’s idiots playing a prank on your high school or even if it’s on the other side of the country.

I am immensely lucky that I don’t have to be reminded of that every day. That although we knew some of the injured, we didn’t lose anybody. We didn’t lose my dad. So I’m glad I can only sympathize. But the empathy that accompanies personal involvement is an important one. It’s the realization that walking a mile in someone else’s proverbial shoes really can change minds, change hearts, and, say, change legislation on a national scale.

Can sympathy still bring us together? Sure, but it’s empathy that gets things done. It’s empathy that moves us forward, together, forward; it keeps us passing laws, changing societal norms and remembering what we would feel like — to be unable to marry the person we love, to feel unsafe at work or school, to be imprisoned, to start from nothing, to work our way up alone.

Sarah is a senior in LAS. She can be reached at [email protected].