The Demise of Empathy

“Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Jesus, The Beatitudes, Matthew 5:4

Of all the things I am sad about from the recent election, one of the most is my realization that a lack of empathy is largely responsible for the huge chasm dividing one half of this nation from the other.

That should have been obvious to me months, if not years, ago. A President-elect who mocks disabled Americans, who calls a decorated POW a loser, who denigrates gold star families and WWII dead, who calls insurrectionists “patriots,”and who threatens revenge on his political opponents and mass deportation to struggling immigrants is certainly no poster child for empathy.

Full disclosure, empathy or the lack thereof cuts both ways. I cannot bemoan the lack of empathy among others without confessing my own antipathy for those who voted for Trump and his fellow MAGAmaniacs.

That said, I have experienced the lack of empathy on a very personal level as I have tried to cope with my own anxiety and depression about the election outcomes. And by the way, the recent clown car arrivals at Mar-a-Lago containing new cabinet nominees has only deepened my concerns over the future of our nation and world.

To those who have mocked the grief and mourning of those like me who are genuinely fearful about the future, I would says this: Feelings are not debatable. They just are. So when I say I feel like I’m living thru a bad SNL, skit you can’t argue me out of that feeling. It is how I feel and no argument is going to change that.

Even if my Trumpian friends make some good points that we can agree on about the current state of our nation, we continue to disagree on who is to blame for the immigration, health care, economic, and a host of other problems.

While the MAGA crowd holds the government responsible for our societal problems, I argue that big business is to blame for most of our woes. not the government. And that unregulated capitalism will be a total disaster for the only planet we have.

Some justify Trump’s cabinet selection of “successful” business people makes sense because the government is one big business. I disagree strongly that our government is a business. The purpose of a business is to make profit for its owners and stakeholders. That is not the purpose of our democratic government, which is to defend and protect the rights and welfare of our citizens.

Those are two very different purposes. From our history we know that the business leaders/“robber barons” are the very folks who drove us into a worldwide depression in the 1920’s. Unregulated capitalism always favors profit over people. Those same geniuses of business also began the destruction of our planet with the greed fostered by the Industrial Revolution.

Most Titans of business lack empathy for the very people who earn their profits from them, and that same lack of empathy is on full display in the dystopian version of the GOP Trump has and is creating. We dems are so anxious and depressed because we’ve seen this movie before, and it didn’t end well.

And yes, anxiety and depression are also emotions which just are and cannot be argued away. They require empathy for as log as necessary and not argument. I’m sorry some people are frustrated with the prolonged mourning of those who lost the election by a slim popular vote margin, and I hope the MAGA crowd’s optimism about the future holds some truth.

Only time will tell, but my values in life require me to oppose and resist evil and injustice where I see it; and I see it in every policy, threat, and cabinet pick Trump has made so far.