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Like many conservatives, I believe in the power of culture to determine both individual success and social cohesion, and I believe we ignore cultural factors at our peril. But I also believe that our government can play a role in shaping that culture for the better-or for the worse.
我和许多保守人士一样，相信文化力量在个人成功和社会团结中的决定作用，相信我们若忽视文化因素就会自食其果。但是我也相信我们的政府能在塑造这种文化方面起作用，使之更好或者使之更坏。
A sense of empathy is one that I find myself appreciating more and more as I get older. It is at the heart of my moral code, and it is how I understand the Golden Rule-not simply as a call to sympathy or charity, but as something more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else's shoes and see through their eyes.
同情心是一种随着年龄的增长我越来越欣赏的品质。它是我道德准则的核心，是我所遵循的“金箴”，不仅仅是呼唤同情或呼唤慈善，而是一种更高的要求，一种设身处地为别人着想和从他人的角度来认识事情的品质。
Like most of my values, I learned about empathy from my mother. She disdained any kind of cruelty or thoughtlessness or abuse of power, whether it expressed itself in the form of racial prejudice or bullying in the schoolyard or workers being underpaid. Whenever she saw even a hint of such behavior in me she would look me square in the eyes and ask, "How do you think that would make you feel?"
和我多数价值观一样，我从母亲那里学会了同情。种族歧视、学校殴斗，或者克扣工资——我母亲讨厌任何形式的残暴、冷漠无情或权力滥用。每次她看到我即使有一点这种行为，她就会直盯着我的眼睛问：“你认为这样让你感觉如何？”
It's not a question we ask ourselves enough, I think; as a country, we seem to be suffering from an empathy deficit. I believe a stronger sense of empathy would tilt the balance of our current politics in favor of those people who are struggling in this society. After all, if they are like us, then their struggles are our own. If we fail to help, we diminish ourselves. But that does not mean that those who are struggling-or those of us who claim to speak for those who are struggling-are thereby freed from trying to understand the perspectives of those who are better off. That's what empathy does-it calls us all to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor. We are all shaken out of our complacency. We are all forced beyond our limited vision.
这个问题我们只问自己是不够的，我想，作为一个国家，我们正遭受着同情心的缺失。随着同情心的增强，我们当前政治天平就会倾向于这个社会中正在抗争的人们。毕竟，他们和我们一样，那么他们的抗争也就是我们的努力方向，如果我们不伸出援助之手，我们将自取灭亡。但是这并不表示那些正在奋斗的人一或者我们当中那些声称要替这些人说话的人一因此不必试图了解富人的想法。这就是同情心的作用，它呼吁我们所有的人去行动：保守主义者和自由主义者，当权者和无权者，受压迫者和压迫者。我们必须将所有的自满抛弃，我们必须超越有限的视域。
No one is exempt from the call to find common ground.
在达成共识的号召下，没有人可以保持沉默。
