Hillary Clinton was left feeling devastated and angry after losing the US presidential election to Donald Trump.
Six months later she was still struggling to understand why she and her supporters should be judged so differently from Trump and his supporters.
However in a new book she has just published, Clinton explains how Pope Francis and his TED talk helped her move on and heal.
“He called for a ‘revolution of tenderness,’” Clinton writes.
“What a phrase! He said, ‘We all need each other, none of us is an island, an autonomous and independent ‘I,’ separated from the other, and we can only build the future by standing together, including everyone.’”.
In the TED talk, Francis “subtly referenced the shift toward isolationism and fearmongering that spread across America and many European countries last year,” Clinton says.
“He pointed out: ‘Thank God, no system can nullify our desire to open up to the good, to compassion and to our capacity to react against evil, all of which stem from deep within our hearts’.”
Coincidentally, his talk was published a year after Clinton released a campaign commercial called “Love and Kindness,”.
She used this phrase while on the campaign trail so she could counter Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric.
In the aftermath of the election, she says she lost sight of that ideal.
She goes on to explain that Francis’s talk has inspired her to embrace “radical empathy,”.
This is the idea that, despite our deep societal and ideological divides, it’s crucial to “recapture a sense of common humanity” and to “try to walk in the shoes of people who don’t see the world the way we do.”
Clinton says after considering Francis’s message, she was faced with two choices for how she wanted to live out the rest of her life:
“I can carry around my bitterness forever, or I can open my heart once more to love and kindness,” she wrote. “That’s the path I choose.”
Source
- America magazine
- Washington Post
- Image: CNN
