I Really Do Care, And You Do Too

We didn’t need Melania’s green-jacket pronouncement of her personal lack of interest in the rest of us to suspect as much. Some people just seem to not give much of a damn about others. She might be one of them. Her husband another. Aren’t they cute? A perfect pair.

Most of us do care, though. It’s hard wired into us by evolution. Those who survived to propagate were the ones who took care of one another.

The speed of modern life has short-circuited evolution, or at least our ability to understand what is happening to us now. It’s hard to think in terms of swimming out of the sea to walk on land or shedding prehensile tails when the daily news cycle is screaming apocalypse now.

A lot of us are very angry at others. One wonders what happened to our evolutionary imperative to look after one another. Are we evolving away from it? Will we survive without it?

Almost all of us look after our children. Most of us look after other family members, after a suitable cooling off period following Thanksgiving dinner with Uncle Joe from back home. On down the line of concern, we might drop a dollar in the Salvation Army holiday collection bucket. Some days that might be about as far as our concern goes.

If indeed we are that unconcerned with how the less-fortunate among us are faring, why does it make me so mad that some people seem determined to stand in the way of helping those who obviously need help? Joe Biden wants to make investments in medical care and child care for those who can afford neither. These initiatives would make us more healthy and productive over the long run, so they should be an easy sell. They are also humane. Another easy sell.

But that’s not the way approximately half the country sees things. I’m not sure if they don’t believe the long-term economic benefits of having a healthy population that has child care so they can go to work, or if they just aren’t into being humane. At least not to “those folks.” And you know who they mean by that.

A related question might be: why do I care? No one in my family needs Medicaid or free child care. Leaving aside his sensible climate policies, the Biden plan is not designed to help me. If fact, the tax increases to pay for it will hurt me.

And yet, I can’t read the news without getting frustrated that we seem so determined not to help one another. When did we get like that? Did Darwin take a break?

Perhaps the answer is that most of us never cared about more than our families and friends. Everyone else was just a statistic. We don’t love statistics. Or mourn them.

What, then, gives a push to big social programs like Roosevelt’s New Deal? Does it take the widespread suffering of the Great Depression to make us care? Does it take the fear of “there but for fortune go I”? Lyndon Johnson wanted to do something like the New Deal, a program he called the Great Society. That went nowhere. The Vietnam war took all his political juice, and we weren’t in the middle of a depression.

Is it only politicians who want to get elected who offer to do good for others? And their political opponents who find fault with that? So that we’re locked in the push and pull and bombast of stump speeches, divorced from genuine notions of the common good. Do we even believe there is a common good?

Or is it just what’s good for each of us individually and those we love? Those other people are just that: other people. They can look after themselves. That seems to be a common sentiment. Along with the implicit idea that if they need help they aren’t trying hard enough. “God helps those who help themselves,” comes to mind as a rationalization for looking away from the needs of others. Also, “Charity begins at home.”

We have so many good reasons for not helping. For not caring about the plights of others. The truth is that their plight is our plight. Too often, though, we don’t come to that realization until it’s too late. Until, as Martin Niemöller so powerfully wrote, “Then they came for me.”