Years ago, Barbara Finch wanted to channel her anxiety about an upcoming presidential election into something useful.

She volunteered to knock on doors in Kirkwood, a suburb of St. Louis. She talked to a number of people who didn’t understand the issues at stake or the backgrounds of the candidates running. It was eye-opening.

Her friend, Ruth Ann Cioci, of Webster Groves, Missouri, also started canvassing and met voters who were unsure which of the candidates were better on the environment, schools and gun control. She wondered: How did so many people not know?

Cioci reassured herself by looking at the polling data showing her favored candidate ahead.

On Election Day, the outcome the friends most feared came to pass: George W. Bush beat John Kerry.

“I was devastated,” said Ann Ruger of Webster Groves.

“We thought George Bush was bad,” Cioci added.

The octogenarian women sitting around her laughed ruefully.

“Twenty years ago, four St. Louis women got pissed off,” Finch, now 87, says about the roots of her political activism. She listed their concerns: Bush wanted to privatize Social Security. St. Louis public schools were failing the children. Women couldn’t obtain the Plan B contraceptive at the drugstore. The environment was threatened.

After weeks of worry and complaint, the group of friends, most of whom had met when their children were in elementary school, decided to do something. They formed a nonprofit organization, Women’s Voices Raised for Social Justice. The group would invite experts and provide monthly educational talks on a variety of social and political issues. They planned to channel that knowledge into their advocacy.

“We couldn’t find anyone else doing what we were doing,” Finch says.

Their programs began attracting a large crowd -- up to a hundred people for some topics. For 20 years running, the organization has hosted a monthly speaker. They have worked on initiatives like getting formerly incarcerated people's records expunged so they can get jobs. They have given away more than 10,000 gun locks in the city and county to help with gun violence prevention. They have fought against plans that would hurt the local environment.

Joanne Kelly, 84, of Webster Groves, served as president of the organization for several years. Now living at a senior facility, she says she is horrified by the current political situation. Recently, she started Seniors for Democracy at the facility and recruited her longtime friend, Cioci, to join. They meet on Wednesdays. They write and send postcards to elected officials. They make phone calls to their representatives relying on the FiveCalls.org site. They attend protests together.

“Are we making a big difference? No,” Kelly says. “But it’s not just sitting around and bitching to our neighbors, which does absolutely no good.”

The women, all in their 80s, expressed frustration and anger that they are unable to do more to fight what they see as the current administration’s authoritarian actions and attacks on democracy.

Among the original four women who started the organization, two are now widowed. Three live in independent living retirement communities. They are battling significant health challenges from osteoporosis to end-stage renal disease and macular degeneration. But they’ve maintained their friendships bound by a fire for social justice and a feisty sense of humor.

“The organization has aged better than we have individually,” Cioci jokes.

Beyond their life changes and health issues, they have something even stronger in common.

“We are still pissed off,” Finch says. “Things are so much worse today than they were 20 years ago.”

She said that age may have forced them to slow down, but it hasn’t stopped them.

"We are still determined, to the best of our now-limited ability," Finch said, "to continue to work, to educate, to raise our voices and strive for a fairer, kinder, more compassionate community.”

When a shooter burst into a study group and murdered two Brown University students and injured nine others, I was roasting a chicken, waiting for my son to return home from college.

My heart immediately ached for the parents of those terrorized on campus. Earlier that same day, their parents may have been thinking about their kids’ final exams, just like I had been. They would have been making holiday plans for their reunited family, just like I had been. The victims had been studying for an economics final; my son is an econ major.

When he walked into the house from the airport, I hugged him tightly. My thoughts kept drifting to those parents.

When a tragedy strikes, even if it's far away, our brains respond the way they have evolved to for our survival. We scan the situation for similarities, whether cultural, social, religious or experiential. Evolutionary biology suggests we are subconsciously assessing our own risk: Was this victim like me?

Human brains respond emotionally to a tragedy before processing it logically. When those whom we feel are like us -- part of our tribe -- are attacked, our built-in human need for belonging makes this emotional response more intense and visceral. We can’t help but think, “That could have been me or my loved ones.”

It’s human nature to feel faster empathy, deeper grief and a greater sense of moral urgency when one of our “own” has been hurt.

This is the instinctive work of our heart. The problem arises when we ignore the work of our brain and the moral ethics that should come next.

Those of us who believe all human life has equal value and that all humans are worthy of basic rights and freedoms have to expand our circle of care if we want to be morally consistent. Otherwise, we risk falling in the trap of hypocrites: claiming to have moral standards that we don’t actually live by.

An incident in the aftermath of the Brown attack illustrated this dynamic. Vice President J.D. Vance reacted to the news of the Brown university murders with a post on X. He shared a photo of Ella Cook, vice president of the campus College Republicans group, and wrote, “This beautiful young girl was one of the murdered students at Brown University. It takes special courage to lead an organization of conservatives on a left-wing campus, and I am very sorry our country has lost one of its bright young stars.

"Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord."

People immediately pointed out that another student had also been murdered: Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an aspiring neurosurgeon whose family immigrated from Uzbekistan when he was a young child.

Why was he not worthy of mention or grief?

Vance followed up an hour later with a post about the loss of Umurzokov.

His initial reaction -- to express grief about the victim to whom he felt connected -- reveals our human emotional bias. But the next step involves examining whether our sense of identity is overriding our morality and ethics. Is our loyalty to our in-group more important than our commitment to the truth?

While emotion is automatic, morality is based on cognition: our ability to think and reason.

For the past year, I repeatedly saw this emotional bias, selective empathy and brazen hypocrisy play out in my own social circles. Muslim friends who had expressed horror about the hate-crime killings of Palestinian Americans, but silence about the murder of Jewish Australians celebrating Hanukkah on Bondi Beach. Jewish friends who shared deep grief about the 38 children killed in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, but never a word about more than 17,000 children killed in Gaza since.

I watched the local reaction to a Jewish leader who posted that there are “no civilians” in Gaza, and thought about how different it would be if an imam would have uttered the exact same words about Israeli civilians.

Whose hate do we excuse and minimize? When does our empathy turn into action? Are we able to resist dehumanizing narratives pushed from our own side?

Moral consistency and integrity often compete with our sense of belonging.

It’s up to us to recognize this tension between instinct and ethics and choose our higher selves.

For the better part of this year, my brain rejected the idea that my father could not get the care he needed at home.

He has advanced Parkison’s, and it took a turn for the worse in early spring. My siblings and I were convinced this flare-up would be treated like the others had been: a short hospital stay, a stint in rehab to regain his strength, and then back at home with my mom, assisted by a health aide.

But this time, he never regained his strength. His cognition declined.

Believe me, I could not have imagined in a million years that my father would be in this situation. I knew my parents would age and face the declines that come for most people. But I did not fathom a world in which my father was in a skilled nursing facility, stripped of his independence and the comforts of home.

For the first several months, I walked around with what felt like a heavy immovable rock on my chest. I’m sure a therapist would have diagnosed that rock as a combination of anxiety and guilt. If someone asked about my dad, I could easily start crying. Once or twice, I called my mom, crying, even though she was going through her own intense grief.

I’m not proud of that.

Three things made that rock lighter: The first is that, by the grace of God, my father has always recognized me and been happy to spend time with me during my frequent visits to Texas. Over the course of eight months, I began to accept that even if he wasn’t going to be who he was before, we could still share meaningful moments.

The second thing that helped: I started writing columns about the challenges and heartache over watching this slow, painful decline. I was taken aback by how many people wrote to me with advice and shared their own stories about taking care of their loved ones with neurodegenerative diseases.

I start crying just thinking about how much those notes meant to me. I felt so lost, and those words were an anchor. Other people had been through this -- and far worse; they felt the same helplessness and grief. There was a common theme: You’ll never regret a minute you spend with him during this time in his life.

Many others confirmed what I was slow to realize, because it hadn’t directly impacted us before: Our country does a poor job caring for its elderly. The vast majority of us can’t afford round-the-clock care at home. Even good nursing facilities are understaffed, and aide workers underpaid.

My father is an immigrant who became a naturalized citizen decades ago. Many of those who care for him are on that same journey. Immigrants comprise about 28% of the overall direct long-term care workforce, including nursing assistants, personal care aides and home health aides, according to data from the Kaiser Family Foundation. About 1 in 3 home health aides are foreign-born.

The government crackdown on immigrants that has ensnared so many legal residents creates a climate of fear and worsens existing staff shortages in this critically important industry. I wish the people cheering these ICE raids could see how many immigrants care for our elderly parents in the most vulnerable situations.

Maybe it would soften some hearts.

The third thing that has eased my sadness and anxiety about my dad’s situation is meeting other people who have a parent with Parkinson’s. When I meet someone who shares this information, I see a knowing look in their eyes that I instantly recognize. I want to hear about all their struggles, about what their parent was like before they got sick, about how everyone is managing.

It makes me feel less alone.

I’ve spent much of childhood -- and adult life -- trying to solve problems for my parents. But this was a problem I could not begin to solve, at least not the way I wish I could.

To be perfectly honest, it made me feel like a failure as a daughter.

A friend recently told me that I was still a good daughter. I physically recoiled from her words, like she had slapped me. How could I think of myself that way when I was so far away, when I was doing so little?

You’re trying your best given the circumstances you’re in, she said.

I keep thinking about her words as I get ready to spend the holidays with my family in Texas. We have several traditions that the whole Sultan clan gets together for -- Sunday brunch at my brother’s home on Christmas Day, a game night, barbecue-and-brisket day.

The rock returns when I prepare myself for what I already know: This will be the first time my father won’t be at home for these moments.

I’ll look for a way to create memories where he is.