Is America Becoming a Post-Empathy Nation?

Photo by Alejandro Cartagena 🇲🇽🏳‍🌈 on Unsplash

Lately, I’ve been wondering if we’ve reached a critical mass of cruel people here.

It’s hard not to look around and feel as though we are becoming a nation lacking a base-level of compassion for the welfare of other human beings; a place filled with people without a desire to see the world through the eyes of another or the imagination to attempt and emotionally walk a path that they have not personally travelled.

The campaign run by Donald Trump and ultimately embraced by a slim-but-still-present majority of participating voters, was one built almost solely on exclusion: on the rollback of rights, the subtraction of opportunities, the erasure of entire people groups.

There is now a strident trickle-down cruelty flowing from the top; an unapologetic callousness that revels in its contempt for people who are hurting or hungry or vulnerable—and it is changing us, individual by individual, relationship by relationship, conversation by conversation.

And as someone raised in the Church, the most unsettling aspect of our steady slide into hard-heartedness is that it is being led by those who should be among compassion’s fiercest defenders.

Though so many here still loudly claim to embrace both the Golden Rule and Jesus' command to love others as they love themselves, an increasingly-loud army of self-identified faith-filled Americans seem incapable of asking (or simply refuse to ask) a seemingly elemental question undergirding their faith tradition:

"What is it like to be someone else?"

What is it like to be a Mexican mother living in such fear and lack and urgency that you would brave arrest and dehydration and death to cross into a place offering the possibility of rest and refuge?

What is it like to be a woman forced to carry the pregnancy birthed from an act of unthinkable violence; reminded every day of the trauma you have been visited by and to know that your body is not your own in the eyes of your assailant, and your neighbors, and of the government?

What is it like to be an LGBTQ teenager, bullied from birth and told by your pastors and your politicians that you are less-than, that you are an abomination; that you should not be able to use the bathroom you feel safest in, or adopt children, or marry the person you love?

What is it like to be a Muslim in America; to be openly vilified and verbally assaulted for your profession of faith, a faith as sacred and meaningful and life-giving to them as your own tradition is to you?

What is it like to be a young black man pulled over on a traffic stop; having seen all the bodycam footage and cell phone video and knowing that the rules that keep most people safe in such situations don't always seem to apply to people who look like you?

What is it like to have a child diagnosed with a quickly-spreading cancer that they cannot possibly combat without it financially crippling them; to feel helpless in the face of a priceless loss that is preventable but unaffordable?

What is it like to have been born and lived outside borders offering the relative ease and mentally peace that you may have spent your life safely nestled in?

These humanity-defending questions never seem to make it through the barricades of fear and prejudice and knee-jerk middle finger malice that seem so commonplace, and as a result, empathy is beginning to dissolve as a shared value here.

And the irony of the fact that I myself find it easy to keep my heart soft toward marginalized people under duress—but nearly impossible to feel for those who don’t seem to care that they are under duress, isn’t lost on me. I struggle to retain a measure of compassion for those who seem to lack compassion, and the hypocrisy of that truth stings me with self-righteousness.

I am trying to ask what it’s like to be someone who has bought into the snake oil Trump and Musk are selling, to not only abide but rejoice in the suffering of another. I want to understand what kind of head and heart yield such callousness but it’s near-impossible to find sufficient answers, yet I know we can’t give up.

The crisis facing us is for the collective soul of our nation. It is not disagreement on policy that is doing the greatest damage to us as a people, it is a scarcity of gentleness and kindness in the face of pain and need and grief that is draining us perhaps beyond repair. It is the dehumanization of others that comes when you lose the desire to see their humanity because you need an adversary.

When people openly deride other human beings while they are at their most vulnerable; when we not only kick people when they are down but do all we can to ensure they never rise, when our default response to suffering is ridicule and incendiary rhetoric—we've lost the best of ourselves and we are morally bankrupting our nation.

I want to believe American can still recover its compassionate heart, but I’m not sure that enough people here still do to swing the pendulum.

What do you think? Can we still find a collective empathy again, and if so, what is the way to it? Let me know in the comments.