Empathy – & June 14

You have to put down a beloved pet. A friend stops by to give you a hug, to assure you that you aren’t alone. He or she understands what you’re feeling and, more than that, feels what you feel. That’s what empathy is.

One of the things I remember clearly about the Biden presidency was how the media addressed his empathy towards others who had lost loved ones. Joe had experienced that kind of loss – a wife and daughter in a car accident when he began in the senate, and later, his son Beau’s death to the same type of brain cancer that killed John McCain.

One of the things I’ll remember about trump is his lack of empathy for anyone. But it’s not just a lack. It’s an inability to feel anything for anyone else.  Something inside trump is just not there. It’s missing, like some essential chromosome or gene that makes us human.

The night that Senator Corey Booker spoke for 25 hours in congress without so much as a restroom break, I understood what empathy looks like when it’s expanded, broadened, inclusive. I understood  how it looks when a politician is first a human being who feels for others.

No one with an ounce of empathy would cut off food to to children who are starving, to vets who need medical assistance, to a woman bleeding out in a parking lot from a miscarriage, to immigrants who fled here to escape oppression, to a senior who survives on a social security check or is in a nursing home on Medicaid. So much that trump and his buddy musk & the rest of his administration have done is unconscionable.

It’s so lacking in any kind of empathy that in my mind it comes together in a single image : the planet in its death throes because a man is so consumed with himself that he can’t see anything else. The world revolves around him. He is king of the world. When he waves his magic wand to commit his next horror, who will stop him?

Trump is the sum total of every dictator who has existed.

So go protest on June 14. Indivisible is having them all over the country.