A few weeks ago my wife and I were going on an evening walk, one of our new routines during the pandemic. Not too far from our house we saw a little activity, and arrived just as one of our neighbors was discovering that his cat, who had gotten out of the house, had just gotten hit and killed by a car speeding down our road.
As he was simultaneously grieving, coming to terms with the situation, and trying to figure out how to respectfully take care of his pet’s remains, we tried to give him the space to do so safely, which mainly meant trying to redirect traffic around him. During the 10-15 minutes this all took, that meant also almost getting run over by multiple cars speeding down the road that really really didn’t want to slow down for us, one of which (a Lyft driver) actually honked at him for being in the road sobbing over his dead pet.
Speeding has been an increasing problem on our street for a while now, so much so that I sent a long and well-researched letter (including diagrams) to our city about it with request for some infrastructural help to slow people down. Something I mentioned in that letter was that these changes would be necessary because we can’t mandate that people actually be considerate of each other, as people thinking about those outside themselves would solve most of the problem in the first place.
A few years ago, there was an article that made the rounds called “I Don’t Know How to Explain to You That You Should Care About Other People”. Since then, I haven’t necessarily remembered the specific points or discussions within, but have thought a lot about the overarching idea – that one of the current fundamental divides in America isn’t HOW we should make life better for everyone, it is WHETHER we should aim for that at all.
As with many of the other problems that have been amplified the past few years, this isn’t a new phenomenon, it is just being given more prominence and validity. And that in itself is an enormous problem.
Think, for example, if wearing masks was being presented universally as an understandable inconvenience, but one that we all can and should do to protect each other instead of some bizarre culture war status symbol.
Obviously, one of the front of mind things causing me to think about all of this is the presidential election, and especially the reaction to it. Just in the few days before I wrote this, prominent Republicans have criticized Joe Biden’s Town Hall discussion with normal people as being too much like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and attempted to smear him for….being a compassionate and caring father. The idea of an empathetic leader is so foreign that it is seen as weakness to them, and, as referenced before, I just don’t know how to respond to that anymore, if I ever did.
We can and should expect and be better than this. That doesn’t mean quiet tolerance of “different opinions” on who is allowed to exist fully in our society or anything like that – the silent accession to discrimination to avoid personal awkwardness or discomfort. In fact, being comfortable above all else is often at odds with being truly compassionate.
What does our choice in national leadership have to do with selfish drivers in my neighborhood? Both nothing and everything. And that is the same with the solution: we can choose to show empathy and consideration to others and expect that our leaders do the same. As Brandon Victor Dixon said in his recent episode of the Hamilcast: “You don’t have a personal connection to something or somebody to want to respect that person or their right to live.”