I want to feel this.

Yesterday afternoon, without realizing why, I found and reread a speech that Vice President Biden gave in Shanksville, Pennsylvania in 2012. It was on September 11th, and he was speaking to the families of the victims of Flight 93 — the plane that crashed before reaching its intended target.

Like I said, I didn’t know why, but I knew that I needed to read that speech. Specifically, I needed to read this paragraph:

My hope for you all is that as every year passes, the depth of your pain recedes and you find comfort, as I have, genuine comfort in recalling his smile, her laugh, their touch. And I hope you’re as certain as I am that she can see what a wonderful man her son has turned out to be, grown up to be; that he knows everything that your daughter has achieved, and that he can hear, and she can hear how her mom still talks about her, the day he scored the winning touchdown, how bright and beautiful she was on that graduation day, and know that he knows what a beautiful child the daughter he never got to see has turned out to be, and how much she reminds you of him. For I know you see your wife every time you see her smile on your child’s face. You remember your daughter every time you hear laughter coming from her brother’s lips. And you remember your husband every time your son just touches your hand.

Every time I’ve read that paragraph (and I’ve done so more than a few times), it has stolen all the breath from my chest and brought tears to my eyes. Given his own heartbreaking personal history, Vice President Biden has become something of an expert on living with grief and his eloquence on the subject is a testament to the pain he’s overcome. His words overwhelm me with the kind of emotion that I don’t often let myself feel — an emotion that I think most of us refuse to let ourselves feel.

There is sadness in that speech, and also an immense amount of love and hope, but that’s not what I’m talking about. Those are emotions that we all allow ourselves to feel on a regular basis, because those emotions are about ourselves.

But I don’t think of myself when I read this speech. I think of the people Biden describes, along with the people they’ve lost and the gaping holes they left behind. For a brief, illuminated moment, the lives of these people I don’t know — their joys, their pain, and all the in between—are intensely real, unavoidable, and personal.

The emotion this speech makes me feel more than anything else is empathy. It’s an emotion I banish from my life on a daily basis: when I ignore the homeless person on my way home from work, when I read the news about the latest episode of gun violence in our country and then immediately switch gears to thinking about what to have for lunch, and even when I choose not to spend time talking with a friend because I’m too tired or busy and I’m sure they’ll manage to figure this problem out themselves.

Empathy is a hard thing to let yourself feel. To a degree, it’s necessary to hold it at bay; otherwise you’d never have the time or energy to do anything but feel for all the people who are suffering in the world at any given time. As of late, though, I’ve begun to think that maybe we’ve overreached in our unspoken victory over empathy.

That, I realize, is the reason I sought out this speech and this feeling yesterday: because yesterday was the day that the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination said we should ban all Muslims from entering the country. Because, when I heard about the shooting in San Bernardino last week, I felt nothing and, judging by the response of most of our legislators, most of our country felt nothing, too. Because, for my entire life, I’ve blithely ignored the ever-mounting death toll in communities of color. Because hundreds of thousands of people are taking their families and what few possessions they can carry through a hellish and dangerous odyssey in order to get away from bombs and bullets, and all we can see when we look at them are threats — not fellow human beings in need.

I don’t know what the long-term solution is—and I’m in no position to impose my opinion on anyone else. But I’m going to make one small, simple change: I’m not going to let myself go numb anymore, because the alternative is too scary and sad to even consider.

What kind of man am I if I don’t allow myself to feel natural empathetic responses to events like these? What kind of friend, husband, and hopefully one day father will I be if I ignore the suffering and mistreatment of my fellow human beings in exchange for an uncomplicated life? What kind of country are we if we become completely desensitized to all this pain?

We need to feel this.