Our Incredible Shrinking Compassion

When I was a child, and into my early twenties, I lived in a small, safe world. My father was volatile, and my mother anxious, but both sets of my grandparents were rocks. I knew them well, and their solid decency made me think everyone shared their values of kindness and generosity. I was aware of the broader world, but only in a Life Magazine photographs kind of way. I could see it, but I didn’t feel it.

I don’t think I lacked compassion as a child, but it wasn’t often summoned by my cosseted circumstances. I spent a lot of time tramping through the woods and seeing life and death among birds and squirrels and developing a kind of Wild Kingdom survival of the fittest mentality. Nature and children can be pretty ruthless.

The first person I saw die was my then mother-in-law. She was 48 and had had both breasts removed and needed an oxygen tank the last months of her life. She was in her hospital bed and her daughter and I were there beside her. One moment she was breathing, and then she was not. I had never seen life just stop like that. I knew about death, but I had no conception of what it was like to die.

After we married, Meg and I took Thanksgiving plates to homeless people in Palisades park in Los Angeles. We had a housekeeper who didn’t speak English but was so kind to our infant son that she became our nanny. We sponsored her for her green card. She’s an American citizen now. Her children were born here, so they are too. She gave money to friends in need, money she couldn’t spare, so we gave her extra money now and then. In a way, those gifts to her were like community grants, with her being the one who knew who where the need was.

When I walked through Pershing Square in downtown LA (skid row), as I often did at lunchtime, just to get out of my office for a bit, I always wondered why, in the midst of the limestone office splendor and hotels and delis, more wasn’t being done to help the homeless who languished on the patchy grass, even why they couldn’t do more to help themselves.

I realize now that poverty is not an acute condition, but a chronic one. The question we must face, as individuals and as a society, is whether we are satisfied to walk past the beggars and needy and look the other way, pretending we do not see, rationalizing why nothing can be done.

Many try to help, individually or through their churches or other organizations, but private charity isn’t up to the task of caring for all the poor and sick. We know that, so we have given government the job of taking up the substantial slack.

That is our uneasy and somewhat unsatisfying status quo. At least it was until we elected a government bent on cannibalizing itself. 

In its zeal to cut costs and avert its gaze from suffering, it is eliminating many of the agencies and programs through which we help people here and abroad. We’re going back to survival of the fittest. That may indeed save money, and it may pave the way for more riches for our most productive citizens, but it will leave many behind.

Worsening climate conditions are causing a great migration out of areas where the habitat can no longer support the population, notably the global south. They are starving and on the move, clamoring at the gates of Europe and the US. It is that threat of being overrun by migrants that has hardened the hearts of many.

Mostly out of fear, I think, but also, among some, simple stinginess, we have given in to a stunning, heartless lack of compassion for our neighbors who desperately need the help of the government assistance programs being strangled, and for those around the world who have for so long counted on the beacon of American generosity in an often bleak world.

The current administration’s plan is to tell the tide to flow out. It won’t, because it can’t. If we stay on this course, we will have to bury the millions who drown.

Consent of the Governed

Elections are our way, here in America, of consenting to be governed by those we elect. They have told us what they plan to do, and we like what we’ve heard, so we vote for them. And off they go. Usually at the speed of a turtle race, which gives us time to forget all about them for a while and check back in at the next election to see how well they delivered on their promises. Then, as they say: lather, rinse, repeat.

But this election didn’t give us the usual turtle race. The hares have taken over. In fact, with a nod to the apocryphal pet-sized dietary preferences of the Haitian immigrants of Springfield Ohio, they’re eating the turtles.

This is not what we expected. Or not most of us anyway. Yeah, yeah, it’s easy to see why people got frustrated, why they wanted change. The same reasons we always want change. The grass is always greener just over the hill. We’re dreamers, hopers, believers. Suckers, too.

There are some hard-core MAGAs who are cheering the Donnielon savagery, but for many of us—most of us, I suspect—this is too much too fast. It seems trigger-happy. It feels bulldozerish, like we’re in the back seat of the car with someone we thought we liked who is coming on way too strong. Should we scream and lurch out the door? Suddenly, this is not feeling consensual.

I didn’t start this piece off thinking about the parallels between governing and consensual sex, but now that I have landed there, I think the analogy is nearly perfect. We all understand sex. We all understand courtship, most of us anyway. It’s a little giddy, and you’re not quite sure what you’re getting into, but the attraction is strong and you want to take the chance. The chance you think you are taking, though, is having, your heart broken, not being raped.

We are being raped. Sure, a majority of us voted for the guy, but when he turns out to be so much more aggressive than we expected, having someone say we voted for him and it’s our own fault is like saying we drank too much before climbing into that back seat. Well, maybe we did, but that doesn’t mean it’s ok to rape us. That’s not what we thought we were getting into.

We need help here. The car door is stuck. The windows are fogged. Metaphorically, we’re too far away to be heard, or at least it feels like that. This is our MeTooVoter moment.

If you feel like Donnielon is raping you, say so. Scream it. Tell everyone, so they will know it is happening to you too, not just them, so they will gain strength from your voice. Scream it so no one can ignore it, so no one can look the other way.