Taking the role of the other

"Imagine!"
          Imagine a world without war!
          Imagine truly loving someone for the rest of your life!
          Imagine how someone who loses a job, a child, a fortune, a skill, a memory, good health, or fame must feel.
          Imagine what the world on this page mean to an author struggling with the problem of clarify and desire to teach a view of reality that makes good sense to him or her
          Imagine how someone would think and feel if he or she won the lottery. Imagine how you would feel if you won. Imagine what it must be like to create a great piece of art or music, a film, a novel, or a poem, or imagine what it must be like to kill in war, to be killed in war, to see yourself as the enemy of someone else, or to be loved by someone you love.
          Imagine what you would think about American society if you were a homosexual. Imagine what you would think if you were one who come to America believing that it is your last change for living a decent life, yet you are confronted by many other who do not believe you have a right to be here.
          Imagine the view of the U.S. President as he or she must try do deal with an enemy who wishes our destruction.
          Imagine how another is thinking when he or she is caressing you, or giving you a compliment, or laughing at you, or punishing you.
          Imagination is truly a magnificent quality. It is an ability central to human life. To imagine means to "create an image" of something. This is an active process, not a simply a respond to a stimuli, not simply seeing an image because it "pops into your head." It involves doing, creating, active building on the actor's part; something is created by the one who imagines; a discussion is involved, a discussion with oneself, what we have called mind action. It is his or her own; it is controlled by the individual. To imagine is to actively see something beyond the immediate and make possible overcoming that immediate while one acts.
         Imagination is something we all do; it allows us to get outside our simple egoistic present physical environment. It allows us to jump out from the immediate to see the future; recall the past; pull out knowledge, events, ideas, and people from our past; play around with what we already know; even create and preceive something new that does not exist in our physical environment nor taught to us by others.

-Charon, Joel M., 2009 Symbolic Interactionism- An Introduction, An Interpretation, An Integration, 10th edition, Prentice Hall, Boston