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.

No Retreat, No Surrender

Like soldiers in the winter's night

With a vow to defend

No retreat, baby, no surrender

—Bruce Springsteen

This is me not waving the white flag. 

My country has been taken over by people who, in important respects, do not share my morals. I was raised by men and women who, leaving aside the very human character defects from which most of us suffer—dollops of avarice, lust and pride—were charitable and humble. I suspect, or at least hope, most of us were. 

But there’s a new gang in town, and its name is MAGA. They live by the Viking code of vanquishing and plundering their enemies (sorry Scandinavia, it was a long time ago, you got much better).

In The New York Times this week, David French considered why members of the MAGA gang don’t seem to care about the misery they inflict on others. The reason, French says, crediting an early twentieth century German political theorist, is that the political philosophy of MAGA is that of friend or enemy. When dealing with the enemy, any behavior, however repugnant by normal standards, is ok.

So MAGA is not my friend, doesn’t want to be, is not one bit interested in non-MAGAs like me and our pitiful, simpering weakness. To borrow from another famous German philosopher, they are supermen.

But MAGA barely won the last election. Based on the popular vote, half of us likely are not cool with the MAGA power play that is unfolding in the early days of the new administration. 

So why do I feel so alone in my foxhole?

I know there are others like me. I read opinion pieces expressing outrage and incredulity. But rather than clarion calls to battle, they sometimes seem more like the last gasps of people about to be burned at the stake. We are not witches, they cry, as the flames consume them. And then they are silent. And others too. No one wants to be burned at the stake. Seeing it actually happening to others understandably makes us feel like perhaps we should hide our pointy hats and broomsticks.

But the end is near only if we allow it to be. We have to screw up our courage and fight. It’s not as bad here (yet) as it was in countries occupied by Germany in WW II. Even there, people fought. They gathered in secret. They published resistance leaflets. They tormented and harassed their occupiers when they could. They kept hope alive until they were liberated.

We aren’t going to be saved by Eisenhower’s Allied forces, but then we aren’t as bad off as was German occupied Europe (again, yet). We must be our own army, fighting in courts, legislatures and elections. 

And we must fight against our own enervating despair. We must tell each other what we are doing, even the small things that may seem inconsequential in themselves but add strength and vigor to the efforts of others. We must give one another hope that we can succeed.

In America (still, so far), the path to victory is through the ballot box. We have to organize for that, of course. We have to campaign.

But first, we need to buck up. We can to this. We must. Our lives depend on it.

Opportunity Cost

 Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.

—Bob Seeger

I remember going into my grandfather’s dim bedroom one afternoon late in his long life. He was sitting up in bed, in faded blue pajamas, his hair combed neatly, his catheter bag mostly hidden by a fold of sheet on the side of the bed. It was the walnut bed he had made for his wedding when he was 21. His wife of 67 years had been gone for ten years by then, even longer if you take into account the years she didn’t remember who he was, who anyone was, leaving him alone in their bed. His head was turned toward the window where sparrows were popping on and off a bird feeder that had a squirrel deterrent collar around it that the squirrels used to hang down and eat their fill. He looked over at me with a wistful expression, and I asked what he was up to, as if I had just been in the kitchen cleaning up and was checking on him, as if I were there all the time instead of once a week, maybe twice, to visit in the afternoons, sometimes with my children, his great-grandchildren.

“I’m just lying here thinking about every mean thing I ever did to my children,” he said.

His son, my uncle, tells the story of coming in one night late and drunk when he was a teenager and winding up on his back from a quick punch and looking down the hallway to see his father’s bathrobe flapping in retreat. My mother was anxious, and I wonder if she ever felt she fully lived up to her parent’s hopes for her, but she never let on that they said anything to make her feel she wasn’t good enough. My grandfather was a preacher’s son, a deacon in the church himself, a college president, a good man who followed the commandments of his faith to feed the poor and visit the sick. I’m pretty sure he didn’t do many mean things to his children.

And yet, now, as I move into the last decades of my own life, hoping to live to be 98, as he did, my children all grown and off on their own, I find myself occasionally wandering down my grandfather’s melancholy path. It’s easier for me to have those regrets, I think. I have done mean things to my children, no doubt more than he did. Sometimes I would get too mad when I scolded them; sometimes I even spanked them. I divorced the mother of my first three, and I understand now that although I had convinced myself they were old enough to understand, I was wrong.

It’s not the direct, obvious offenses that bother me at three in the morning, though. It’s something much vaguer, but perhaps because of its uncertainty even more troubling. Call it opportunity cost. We all know what that is: it’s when you let time go by without taking advantage of a fleeting opportunity, or when you put time and money into something only to realize later that they would have been better spent on something else. 

We think of opportunity cost as our own responsibility, or fault, something we did or didn’t do, a choice we made. But as a parent, I, and maybe others like my grandfather and me, blame ourselves for the opportunities our children missed. If I had just insisted that she stick with piano lessons… If I had taught him how to manage money better… If I had convinced him he should take chances in love…

Some parents live through their children. This is different than that, though. More painful, in a way. I’ve learned (the hard way) that my children don’t want me to tell them what to do. Mostly I resist. This isn’t about seeing them about to make a mistake and rushing in with a warning of good advice. I do that less and less. No, this is something more systemic, reaching back deeply into their childhoods, when they were mine to mold, or at least I thought they were, and I worry I didn’t do a good job shaping their raw clay. And because of that, because of my failures when they were young, their missed opportunities as adults are my fault. This is a particularly devastating revelation when it comes long past the time I can do anything about it. I have taught them to be independent, to make their own decisions, but may have left them ill-equipped for the task.

I know, I know, I’m beating myself up way too much. Maybe. I wasn’t an abusive or neglectful dad, I did most of the things good dads are supposed to do. It’s up to them now. And each of them is doing a great job stewarding their life. They are all happy and successful.

And yet late at night the dread creeps in that I didn’t do enough. Perhaps the real question is whether, no matter how much I did, I could ever feel it was enough. There is some piece missing in me, I fear, not them. Maybe it is the same piece my grandfather felt was missing in him. Something that denies contentment when looking back over the landscape of fatherhood. Maybe lots of dads feel this way, not just my grandfather and me. I hope not.