CXLV. The High Cost of Looking Away

I have spent a whole working life watching people try to remove empathy from the room. It is simply easier to exist if price is the only thing ever considered in anything you do.

We will work to squeeze another hundred dollars out of a price, yet never picture the person who put the thing together, drove it through the night, or stood on a line to make it. We eat a hamburger and never think about where the beef came from or whose hands assembled it. And with the rise of AI, robots and laptops will allow more autonomous thinking, things we set and let go. It will be all the easier to remove empathy from our experience.

People who focus on costs, the bean counters in life, typically win these arguments because the answer is clean. Empathy is more complicated because it demands the consideration of the bigger picture.

Caring slows things down. Time is money, but it goes both ways. Empathy makes you wonder what happens to people after a decision is made. What gets left behind for other people to deal with or clean up. Remove empathy, and the whole business of our current capitalist culture doesn’t need to change.

That is the quiet factor under this entire moment we’ve been experiencing. The removal of that one consideration has made cruelty easier and less expensive. You can hear it in the way fellow Americans are described. You can see it in the actions that allow quiet, law-abiding citizens to suddenly become less healthy, hungry, or hunted.

Consider the recent demolishing of USAID. Established in 1961, it became a humanitarian arm of our government, whether it was to help feel the world’s poor or help countries move more toward democracy. I remember riding in a van with USAID workers in the south of Russia, a team sent to assist farmers interested in breaking away from forced collectives to individual ownership. You’ve probably seen numerous photos over the decades of food arriving to assist families after natural disasters or famine.

Less than one percent of the federal budget drove USAID and it helped keep millions of people alive.

Gone in a matter of weeks.

When people started counting the dead, the world's first trillionaire told them it was fake news.

Nicholas Kristof went and found the names.

Getting rid of empathy only holds up as long as nobody looks or says anything.

Part of being a great nation is doing great things, with an emphasis on the doing. It’s not enough to simply look or sound the part. Peace and prosperity comes through shared values in action.

It distresses me to write what we’ve allowed in one year’s time. Elon Musk now calls America home. He holds a fortune larger than most national economies, assembled in a world where roughly half the population still lives in poverty. To make it worse, we then allowed him to switch off the American reputation that gave aid to the world’s poorest.

The men that set up USAID knew first hand the ravages of World War II. They understood that a world on fire eventually drags us in. On one small shared planet, people’s catastrophes are always part of our business. Warmongering, making deals with dictators, and cutting off aid to the poor only brings pain that much closer to home. You can see it now everyday though you may refuse to make the connections.

Empathy is the one thing that has ultimately brought us to account for our wrong doings. We fought a war to end slavery. We apologized for locking up our own citizens during the Second World War. Civil rights and voting rights were recognition of not treating Americans the same. The Americans with Disabilities Act was in many ways having empathy for those who struggle to do things we take for granted.

It is a special breed of coward that portrays empathy as softness, yet it is the single feature that has ever separated the countries the world admires from the countries the world merely fears or forgets.

When the US responded, it meant something.

Take that away and we are run of the mill. Thuggish. A country that runs entirely on self-interest and it’s own appetite.

Call it having meaning.

Call it the mystery of why we are all here in one place at one time.

Bean counters cannot see it. Narcissists can’t feel it. A trillionaire may think he built his fortune alone.

Empathy is how we keep from sleepwalking through life. It is the recognition that other people’s lives are as real and experienced as our own. It helps us to be builders and innovators, not bullies and idealogues.

It is the predominate reason an American identity is worth continuing.

The green bank money stays put. A full DC Circuit told EPA that clawing back twenty billion in clean energy grants was likely unlawful, six votes to four.

After 272 days at sea, the USS Abraham Lincoln is heading home. A typical carrier deployment is about seven months, including port calls. The Lincoln crew went more than 260 days without one. Public service turned into a test of endurance.

Rural Hall says no, five to two. Forsyth County commissioners denied the rezoning for a hyperscale data center across from the town hall. One of them said he would not cram it down everybody's throat. Showing up worked.

Richard Florida has spent decades writing about what makes a great city, and the piece he just filed is bleaker than most. The wealthy used to threaten to leave when a city dared tax them. It was mostly bluff, but not this time. The author traces some examples, landing in Miami with their fortunes and taking the tax base with them. What never comes up across the whole piece is what a city gave them on the way to that fortune. Some of these men built their wealth by gutting companies and erasing thousands of jobs, then secured a waterfront lot with no state income tax.

Thankfully, not everyone is built like this. Plenty of people spend a career keeping the water running, the classroom open, the street safe, and never ask what it is worth.

Taxes are what pays them.

The public needs to decide if it’s ok to skip towns like this.

Most Americans will not read this one, and fewer still will care, because Sudan is poor and far away and these are names that don’t come up at dinner. Here’s the question. If a genocide is underway and diplomacy could still bite, shouldn’t we use it? Haven’t we realized that Ebola reached us, Covid reached us, and more of the world’s problems will reach us if we don’t respond?

When the United States backs out of the world, something fills the gap.

Our kids will be the ones who pay the bill.

A Hope for Better Days

Marc J. Yacht

I cry for the voice of reason
And weep for the loss of kindness
Then sob at the sight of treason
Hoping for an end to blindness.

So odd the days that confront me
A surprising new world order
A startling solemn sight to see
Humankind reduced to fodder.

Wanton leadership run amok
Careless, deadly, and unfeeling
A nation's people out of luck
A choking cruelty unyielding.

I cry to end the tyranny
Do others see what I do see
Hope for the end of piracy.
Hearts, minds and empathy set free.

Before you go

Keep reading things that make you picture people instead of numbers. Keep considering who is on the other end of decisions.

Be a good human.