The Short Empathy Span of Americans
by R. Anthony Arnold
edited by Francine Dash
August 2024
We’ve been here before.
Nearly two years ago in San Francisco, California, Paul Pelosi, husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was viciously beaten with a hammer by a home invader.
A little more than five years ago, in Alexandria, Virginia, there was a mass shooting at the Congressional Baseball Game, which left representative Steve Scalise and lobbyist Matt Mika in the hospital.
Thirteen years ago a mass shooting took place in Tucson, Arizona, killing a federal judge, John Roll, along with 5 others, and wounding 15 others. Representative Gabby Giffords, the target of the shooting, survived, but only after being placed in a medically induced coma, which led to her leaving public service.
So, the shooting of former President Donald Trump, while a remarkable event, isn’t an unprecedented one. This isn’t an attempt to downplay the seriousness of what occurred. It’s more about gaining perspective by placing the shooting, and the reactions to the shooting, in proper context. It’s about asking the right questions, in the hope that the answers to those questions might illuminate a path out of a familiar darkness.
In the aftermath of the shootings I mentioned, and similarly in the wake of the most recent one, there were calls from politicians for unity and for lowering the policial temperature. Us normal citizens, myself included, called for leadership and a bridging of the divide.
And, if only for a moment, there was something resembling calm, a glimpse of an America all looking in the same direction toward peace. But, in each and every case, peace was fleeting. Within a week, we see that process playing out with the Trump shooting.
The ‘Great Engine of Partisanship’ has roared back to life. This cessation of hostilities has ended and the warring factions are back at it, once again. Whether this is good or bad is a matter of debate; but what’s clear is that our ‘dysfunctional normality’ has returned.
In those first 24 hours after the shooting, there was a mad rush to write some version of “everything has changed;” or “nothing will be the same.” It was as if journalists and commentators hoped that by repeating the claim, ad nauseam, they could make it true. Maybe, they just wanted to make sure they had staked out their historical headline, just in case.
But nothing changed. Everything has been the same.
Other than a bandage that has adorned the right ear of former president Trump, and the occasional reference in a speech, the impact of an attempted killing of a nominee for the most powerful elected office in the world has been zero. If a person, like Rip Van Winkle, fell asleep the day before the shooting, and just woke up today, they might not even realize it had happened at all.
It’s shocking how easily we assimilate the unimaginable into our everyday lives.
Random violence, the kind that shatters communities and traumatizes Americans every day, is a part of America’s tapestry. It’s so deeply woven into our daily lives, that I do think we’re all deeply desensitized to what is actually taking place. We respond to horror not with revulsion, but with Facebook posts. Everything, no matter how awful, must become content. Our never ending desire to wave the flag of our partisan alliances has driven us beyond civility.
In the days following the shooting, a predictable set of behaviors emerged. There were jokes, memes, and so many “I know he was shot, but…” style posts. Alternatively, there were those who thought that the avoidance of a tragedy was evidence of divine intervention, some kind of mandate from God.
Pause.
A person died! The divine intervention theory sees the death of one and the injury of others as either irrelevant, or summarily dismissed with a disclaimer so passing that you could blink and miss it entirely.
Are we really so depraved? Is this really the best we can do? Must every single thing be processed through the lens of politics, in order to determine the appropriate reaction?
Where have all the leaders gone? But then, again, what kind of visionary leader could possibly deliver a message that would matter to this America?
We laugh at things that are no laughing matter. We shrug off events that should make us feel something. We castigate our supposed enemies for their lack of empathy, then turn around and display none of it. Moral consistency is yet another casualty of filtering human interactions through the overly simplistic analysis of “left vs right.”
In 1963, 92% of Black Americans, and 35% of White Americans, had a favorable view of Dr. King. By 1966 those numbers had fallen to 83% and 27%. And if you want to talk about the gap, well that part seems pretty self-explanatory.
But what’s more upsetting is that Dr. King, a man with a moral compass that was always firmly pointed in the direction of justice, found himself increasingly unpopular with everyone. It turns out that telling people about themselves is, and always has been, the shortest road to disfavor.
So, do we really want leaders? Or do we just want someone who will tell us that our feelings are good and correct? Do we want to feel better? Or do we want to be better?
The former requires nothing of us. The latter asks for everything, and offers nothing more than the knowledge that you’re doing the best you can, which is all any of us can really do.