If you are confused, you are not alone.
If you are afraid, you are not alone.
If you are angry, you are not alone.
The demise of our democracy, which we are all witnessing, is happening piece by piece, day by day, tweet by tweet. When asking what is so “beautiful” about the “Big Beautiful Bill” that Congress just passed, we might want to look to “1984.” the book by George Orwell, who wrote:
“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
Even though Orwell wrote these words in 1949, some of us are just now beginning to understand. At its best our government has always been imperfect; however, under the current leadership it has taken a deep dive into a morally bankrupt abyss. Tax laws have been designed to move wealth from the poor and already financially struggling to millionaires and billionaires. Funding for the deficit, which is sure to follow, will come from cuts to food and medical care for those who can afford neither. Starvation is a form of torture, often used by oppressive regimes. Watching a loved one suffer and die from lack of medical treatment is a form of torture. And we have certainly been witnessing persecution. Currently, it is undocumented and documented immigrants; we can probably guess which “enemies of the state” will be next.
A new epidemic is spreading throughout our country, as merciless as COVID-19 but much more discriminating, and the virus is assaulting the moral fiber of America. Like cancer, the disease attaches itself, then destroys the host. In this case the host is empathy; that most basic of human qualities. Empathy crosses the barriers of birth, of race, of gender and ethnicity. Empathy moves us to see others as we see ourselves. Empathy even extends beyond the human experience to other sentient beings; just look at how we love our dogs and cats, or how we will nurse a broken-winged bird back to flight. Empathy is under attack tacitly through executive orders and legislative cuts and overtly through persecution by ICE and illegal deportations. Like COVID, the virus began in far off places with drastic cuts to USAID for food and health care to those who may not have lived close enough to be viewed as “neighbors.” But now the virus is in our neighborhoods, and soon it will affect those who have depended on the limited empathy of our government for food (SNAP) and medical care (Medicaid).
Ironically, it’s not only the government but religious institutions as well. As evangelicals have embraced Christian Nationalism, many of their leaders have adopted Orwellian doublespeak in an attempt to legitimize the offensive on empathy. Recently, well-known evangelical writers have published books with titles like “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion” and “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits”. How can empathy be counterfeit when it is by definition (Oxford) “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”? I have previously written about the false premises of Christian Nationalism, but this theological contortion stretches it to a new low. Even those outside of any faith tradition are rightly appalled. While most of us have never experienced the actual effects of hunger in our bodies, we can still understand or imagine what it must be like for the children and weeping parents we see on the 6 o’clock news. We have the luxury of switching the channel or turning it off — they don’t.
Lack of empathy, or worse labeling empathy as toxic, allows cruelty to go unchecked. This rogue administration is using cruelty with a calculated precision to numb and desensitize bystanders, namely those of us watching all of this happening before us. Calculated cruelty has long been a tool of tyrants to cajole and control the populace. It has a profound psychological effect on the nervous system similar to trauma by initiating a fight or flight response. In most cases there is nothing tangible to fight, so flight becomes the only option. Rebranding empathy as toxic enhances the power of the cruelty on display.
What is actually toxic, what truly is a sin, what is morally unfathomable is the wealthiest country in the world cutting off food and medical care to poor countries when it has already been effective, and at a cost that is negligible on the overall budget of this country. It is simply cruel. We feed the birds in our backyard, but we can’t feed a child in Sudan? and soon it will be closer to home, families in our communities, people who look like us and speak the same language. Does that increase the possibility of empathy, or is empathy still toxic? Rounding up immigrants or those who might “look” like an immigrant, shackling them, shaving their heads and parading them off an airplane to a prison in El Salvador is designed to be shockingly cruel. Having empathy does not make us Christian or Jewish or Buddhist; it makes us human. We are not just at risk of losing our souls; we are at risk of losing our humanity. As difficult as it is, please, don’t change the channel, don’t turn it off. We may not yet know what the next steps are in this fight, but the first step is empathy.
The Rev. Michael Duda is a retired United Church of Christ minister living in Rockport. He formerly served as the senior pastor of the First Church in Wenham. Midweek Musings is column that rotates among Cape Ann’s clergy.