empathy and guilt

I was watching the news, this afternoon. It seems that someone has abducted a three-day old infant from a hospital in Texas.

What was this person thinking? Were they mentally ill? Or was there some bizarre sense of entitlement? Or something truly sinister?

I thought about how we try to avoid guilt, and especially avoid arousing feelings of guilt in others. However, as I imagined the situation of this child abductor, it occurs to me that guilt is a feeling related to empathy. Perhaps this person was never encouraged to feel guilt.

So I'm asking the question, without offering more than the notion, that guilt is the emotion that allows us to experience the pain we inflict on others. Thus from experiencing guilt we learn empathy.

Updates from Ottawa

I've been slow updating, due to new projects. The Mac Group hired me to update and webmaster their site. Virtually an accident. I had dropped in to buy a hard drive, got to gabbing, and was hired on the strength of my experience doing a former band's website(The magdalens- see my podcast).

vansertima.ca is the name I'm setting up my video business. Aside from standard corporate video, I'm interested in developing video content for web and mobile phone.

Finally i'm writing songs, stories and film scripts. More on that later.