You probably have heard the saying that "a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who has been arrested," and there is a lot of truth in that wisdom. In point of fact, most people day by day, have enough to do or think about, that they aren't truly concerned about other people in general. In particular most people aren't overly concerned about other people's feelings, or what is really going on in their lives because they have plenty enough in their own life to worry or to contemplate about. While one can call this pure selfishness on their part, it isn't necessarily selfishness, it can just be a vague lack of concern for things that don't trouble or concern that person's particular bailiwick.
However, the point to be made, is that we live in a society of people, to which, we should be concerned about our fellow brothers and sisters, not only because no man is an island unto himself, but because it is our humanitarian duty to love each other as good neighbors. The first step towards developing empathy with others is to actually listen and to pay attention to other people. Far too many of us, as a matter of course, don't listen all that well to others or provide that focused attention which is so vital to meaningful communication, because we are in actuality not overly concerned with another person's viewpoint, but more concerned that they don't waste too much of our time, or try to impose themselves upon us, or simply that they don't take too long to make their point.
It is difficult to be empathetic, for a lot of reasons, to which one of the most important ones is that if you have not actually lived in another person's shoes, it is hard to fathom exactly what they are saying or where they are coming from. For instance, even in cases to which people have literally lived in another person's shoes, such as "Black Like Me", to which a white man successfully re-imaged himself as a black man; that experience while authentic on certain levels such as the fact that the "mask" was successful in fooling both black as well as white that John Howard Griffin was indeed a black man, could not at the same time fully encapsulate what it was to be a black man in the south in 1959, because Griffin was not educated as a black man, wasn’t raised as a black man, and didn't live as a black man, because, he wasn't actually black. Still, the experience, set in the racial tensions of its time, was enlightening, to say the least, and most definitely was an experience that led to a profound understanding of racial perceptions in America from a "black" perspective.
If you haven't been very short in height, or extremely overweight, or gay in a hostile community, or of the wrong religion, or of the wrong race, or from the wrong type of family, or have the wrong clothes, or grown up surrounded by negative role models, it is virtually impossible to really empathize successfully with these types of people. However, the first step in all of these situations, is not to be judgmental, not to jump to conclusions, but instead to take the time and to have the consideration to let that person have their say, so that through your interactions with each other, you can look behind the veneer, to feel and to relate to the essence of that person and to find common ground.
Being emphatic is not easy, it never will be, but a basic understanding that all people have a deep and abiding interest to be both loved and validated as a human being is the first step towards better days.