Lack of empathy, one finds, is epidemic in our modern rat race world. It’s a defining feature of our terminally distracted times, I would say. Flip the channels, virtually every station features competitive zero sum games with one winner and everyone else losing. An inadvertently dismissive or hurtful comment often comes from the same distracted place: I’m telling you how it looks to me and I’m too overwhelmed by my own problems to consider how my observation will effect you, how it would effect me if someone offered it in response to my situation.
There are a hundred examples of our culture’s lack of empathy. A true horror like the shooting at that Connecticut elementary school has everyone momentarily aghast while, off the news, kids are shot dead regularly in our nation’s poorest neighborhoods, while the tiniest kids the same age in Pakistan and Yemen live with drones flying over them daily that suddenly and without warning blast a group of people and send body parts flying. Talk about instilling life-long PTSD!
We rationalize why this “collateral damage” is necessary, but the exercise does not involve the slightest empathy. Leave aside the deadly problems of our permanent underclass, as is always done, and let’s look at the drone program for one concrete example. Suppose we really are killing many of the worst of the worst with drones, people who are actively plotting to come kill us. The seven year-old and her five year-old brother who occasionally get blown up is a tragedy as big as a seven year-old middle class child getting blown up here, as devastating as a child’s death in the ghetto. But we can’t grasp that any more with the drones and there’s no serious conversation about it. We accept the false choice: it’s this drone program of targeted killing or American soldiers, with their boots on the ground, getting maimed, killed and, if they survive, coming home with PTSD of their own. It comes under the heading of “shit happens, pass the roast beef, please”.
My closest friends often have the reflex to explain why hurtful behavior was not meant to hurt, and why one shouldn’t take it personally. I’ve been trying to get them to at least pause to acknowledge that I feel hurt, and have a right to feel that way, and only then to offer the Perry Mason-like defense of why the other person didn’t mean to accidentally take my eye out with a stick and how bad they feel, worse than me, really, and did I stop to consider that an accident means it wasn’t done on purpose, and you know he’s preoccupied and why would you expect him, of all people, to be more careful with a sharp stick in a dark room, and some people see better in the dark than others, and maybe you won’t completely lose the sight in that eye when the bandages come off, why are you always so negative, you’re like your mother, the glass is always half full…. blah blah blah.
We all know these types, I guess. The worst of it is, most of the time most of us are these types. Living overwhelmed in an overwhelmingly demanding world.
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