Bloom’s article I found particularly interesting. Not only was it shorter to fit the attention span of a kid in college it was very well written. His paragraphs were structured very well to flow smoothly and convey his three main points. Empathy is biased and has a very narrow frame, people can only care for themselves and those around them let alone the billions of people in the world. As Bloom stated “spotlights only illuminate what they are pointed at, so empathy reflects our biases.(Bloom, 2)”. This quote explores one of Bloom’s first arguments in his speech, he claims that the human mind is only capable of focusing on one set of problems at a time. Later in his essay Bloom actually calls on the reader to attempt to think of multiple problems their friends may be facing right now and how you could help them. What I found was that it’s difficult to keep everyone in your immediate forethought, and sometimes you can’t help everyone that you might want to. Another claim which I found to be prevalent throughout Bloom’s speech was the concept of self restraint. Bloom mentioned that if you over stretch your boundaries that your empathy can do more harm than good. A very good example that Bloom gave was the Sandy Hook shooting in comparison to the shootings in chicago. “In the year of the Sandy Hook killings, more schoolchildren were murdered in one American city, Chicago, than in Newtown (Bloom,2).” This quote shows that although we might still care about people getting hurt we often overlook other major problems we face in our societies. Yet this quote is so important because of its relevance. A final theme which I found in Bloom’s work was that morals can be outweighed by personal interest. If you care about a person you will do everything in your power to help them but that might statistically be a poor decision. You’re choosing to help the minority over the general public. Overall Bloom’s work was very well written and I found it to be very interesting.

I do agree with Bloom’s points, I applied every argument he made or rather every paragraph to my own life. I found everything to be applicable and accurate therefore I do agree strongly with Bloom’s arguments at the end of the speech as well Blooms says that he does believe empathy is a good thing but it’s missued regularly in our current society. 

Originally I thought of empathy as being more inclusive but as Bloom explained our own metal limits keep us from being empathetic to everyone all the time. We focus more on helping those we know, then those we can relate to or admire, and finally those we feel deserve pity but often there’s very little left for those that really need the most help. 

“In the year of the Sandy Hook killings, more schoolchildren were murdered in one American city, Chicago, than in Newtown (Bloom,2).” This quote shows that although we might still care about people getting hurt we often overlook other major problems we face in our societies. Yet this quote is so important because of its relevance.