Walking Past a Bleeding Man

You come around a curve and see a man lying injured by the roadside, conscious but in pain, his bicycle banged up in the ditch. You call 911 and kneel beside him to comfort and reassure him until the ambulance arrives. He’s worried about his dog, who’s licking his face now.

When the ambulance has gone and a friend the man asked you to call has picked up the dog and the bicycle with the broken front wheel that hinted at the cause of the accident, you go home, almost reluctantly, finding it hard to disengage. You tell your family about what happened, reliving the experience yourself. Each telling is a tiny discharge of your anxiety for the man. 

The next day you call the hospital to see how he is doing. “Would you like to talk to him?” a nurse asks. “No, I just wanted to check on him.”  

You call the man’s friend to see how the dog is doing.

A week later, you read about a cyclone in South Asia that has killed hundreds and left thousands homeless. Thinking of the man you helped, you donate to he Red Cross relief fund.  A month later, though, when another disaster strikes some other part of the world, you don’t think there’s much you can do. You can’t make a donation for every tragedy anywhere in the world.

We are tribal by nature. That’s the good and the bad of us. We look after our own, an instinct that has helped the species survive. 

For most of human history, we didn’t know what was happening in other parts of the world, and when the telegraph and later our digital virtual world brought us news from afar, we became interested in the same way we are interested in the migration of birds and butterflies. The beauty of passing geese or Monarchs moves us in the moment, as does human suffering in a distant land, but it is not of us. It is something apart, for which we feel little responsibility, not least because there’s usually almost nothing we can do about it, good or bad.

Our relatively new, and suddenly vast, knowledge of what is going on around the globe connects us to those outside our villages. But does that knowledge make those distant souls “our own”? Are they part of us, part of our now global tribe?

Not so far.

If anything, our new, sharper, long-range vision seems to be giving us only better awareness of threats from other nations and people who are, in our parochial estimation, not like us. Build the wall. We don’t want those people in our country. And as for the ones who snuck in on Sleepy Joe’s watch, “Get them the hell out of here,” as our fearless leader is so fond of saying.

All that is disheartening, but not too surprising. Xenophobia has been ever thus. I suspect it’s baked into our Darwinian DNA, just like the instinct to help our immediate neighbors, at least the ones who look like us.

What is surprising to me, though, although in a nation not that long past an actual civil war I suppose shouldn’t be, is how that empathy and regard for our neighbors weakens with distance, and not very much distance at that, like the magnetic field of a child’s painted horseshoe magnet.

We don’t have to go far from home before the people we meet are just scenery. Go across a state line into a different cultural or political miasma, and the scenery becomes not just un-engaging, but threatening.

If the man in the bicycle accident at the start of this piece had cut an arm and was bleeding badly, most of us would without thinking rip off our shirt to make a bandage. But when the residents of a town not even too far way, in another state, perhaps another cultural zone, can’t afford medical care, we don’t cry out for better aid programs to provide it. Maybe we think there’s nothing we can do, as a practical matter, or that’s what we tell ourselves, but the truth of it, I think, is that we just don’t really care. Distance makes the heart grow not fonder, but apathetic.

Indeed, if those fellow countrymen are enough different—in skin color, religion, politics—we may feel they are getting what they deserve. If they want more, they need to work harder. That’s the American way. It’s even built into the laws saying who among the poor is entitled to Medicaid health benefits.

We’re judgmental and arrogant and fearful. With that mindset toward neighbors too far away to know, it doesn’t seem to me that if they crash their bikes into ditches we will give much of a damn what happens to them.

If they had a dog, though, who had been running along beside them in that loyal way of all dogs, well, we would worry about that poor pup.

Those Were the Days

        "Those were the days, my friend,

        We thought they'd never end..."

            From the 1960s song by Gene Raskin

"We'd sing and dance forever and a day." That's what I thought, too.

That song was little ahead of its time. When it was written, we were still killing Kennedys and Viet Cong. But by the 1980s, after we had whipped Nixon (who's looking not so bad these days) and inflation, we eased into in a golden era. Even our current gilder-in-chief is probably at least a little nostalgic for his virile marble casino days as he struggles to raise his latest erection (of course I mean his ballroom).

I know about cycles. By most reckonings, everything is cyclical. But over the long-term, the trend has been up, with almost everything getting better, certainly here in the United States.

So, are we just in a bad temporary cycle? Like when there were long lines in the 1970s to get gas, if you could even afford it, or a few years later, when mortgage rates were in double digits? As then, will serious people like Paul Volcker come to our rescue? Even Ronald Reagan is looking pretty good from the now free side of the Berlin Wall.

The way we got through the civil rights era, the oil shock, the cold war is we were steady and determined. Many (perhaps most) Southerners didn't want civil rights for blacks, but we kept up the pressure until they came around. We hated the medicine Volcker gave us to break the fever of inflation, but it cured us. "Mr. Gorbachov, tear down this wall," president Reagan famously said, while upping the ante on an arms race that beggared the Soviet Union and forced them to change their ways, at least for a while.

We have some of the same problems today as then, and some new ones, but there is nothing steady about the way we are dealing with them. There are several reasons for that (many having to do with the volatile nature of our current leadership) but the root cause is that there is no consensus on what ails us. We are a nation of people half of whom are colorblind trying to discuss the artistic merit of Mark Rothko's art. Is it shades of red, or shades of gray?

To manage our affairs properly, we have to see reality accurately. We cannot even discuss it if we do not. And lately we do not.

What has made some of us colorblind? (Although I'm sure my biases are obvious, I note that I am not here assigning this disability to any particular viewpoint, just noting that, metaphorically, it exists in enough of us to swing elections. Take your pick which political camp you believe needs to go in for a vision check.)

We are by nature clannish. In uncertain times, we look to our peeps. Family, friends, neighbors. What's going on in some other wacky part of the country or world doesn't carry as much emotional weight. The views of those around who we care about confirm our own.

But like weeds on rocky ground, change does take root in even the most insular communities. We all know stories about how people's attitudes toward others with different views have changed when they get to know them. A child who comes out as gay, a nanny who is in the country illegally. We love those people, and our love softens our reaction to things about them that in the abstract we don't like but in the flesh we see as part of a greater whole that we do like.

Right now, we are suffering from too much abstraction. Too much identity vilification. Too little humanization. Too little empathy. We hated immigrants, in the abstract, so we elected someone who swore to get rid of them all. Now that that is happening with a vengeance, it's touching lives personally, not abstractly.

We have to do two things to get back to talking about whether an all red square is art. First, we have to understand what it is we are seeing. And, second, it has to matter to us. 

Eventually, government action, especially when it veers suddenly from predictable and boring to jarring and unsettling, hits home hard enough, affecting those we know and care about, to change attitudes, and votes. What we have to worry about is how much damage will be done before it does.

A brilliant friend whom I have admired for over half a century said to me a few days ago that he expects the country will mostly recover, but it will never be the same.

I hope he's wrong about that last part. I hope we will not only recover but reach a new level of mutual acceptance and cooperation. I do know this, though. We are in dangerous territory right now. We need to be careful.