Regardless of religious beliefs, the story of Jesus is a crucial contribution to the cultural mythos. Partly this is because it is so different. According to the story, he is not a king, not a hero who performs great feats of physical strength or cunning, not a warrior in battle who vanquishes enemies. Jesus is born of poor parents in a barn (or a cave) far from home. His birth is witnessed not by princes and priests but by animals.
Jesus goes on to preach that “the greatest of these [virtues] is charity.” His Sermon on the Mount stands as a bold statement of personal and social values, unique in our mythologies.
The Church of my youth was divided (though not as starkly as today) between those who emphasized institutional rules and kept company with power, and those like Dorothy Day who stood with humble workers and “the least of these.” For all the corruption and cruelty within organized Christian churches, there were always those who dedicated their lives to helping and being with the hurt, the needful, the oppressed and otherwise forgotten.
This past year we have seen a new challenge by purported Christians to the core message of Jesus, and we have seen it enacted at a horrific scale. The challenge is the outspoken denial of empathy. Two prominent Evangelicals write and talk about “toxic empathy” and empathy as sin under circumstances that are familiar for the extreme right.
The most prominent exponent of empathy as a weakness this year was Elon Musk, who when given the keys to the entire federal government, virtually destroyed the infrastructure and the support that addressed the life and death needs of the world’s poorest people. It is estimated that nearly 700,000 people—most of them children—have died this year directly because of this action, with many more suffering with the consequences. Given Musk's rhetoric, there's a scary likelihood that this was intentional.
The ongoing war on immigrants of color (from Mexicans to Africans to Asians) by the federal government is a stain on the nation’s soul. Even apart from the naked racism, the cruelty and brutality is unprecedented in American history. Mothers have been torn away from sick babies, an attack dog set upon a man who simply stepped outside his own home, and children as young as six years old have been imprisoned alone. There were no circumstances under which a six year old is imprisoned in America, until now.
All of this is being done in defiance of law and basic norms of conduct, with people disappearing into a growing network of for-profit prisons and foreign hell holes, all supported by tax dollars.
But empathy has not ended. Empathy is a personal and a social virtue, the ground of cooperation, which is the basis of society and anything we care to call humanity.
We see empathy in action in protests and protections and actions in Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston, New York, New Orleans, Charlotte, Columbus (Ohio), Oakland (California), Pontiac (Michigan), Pueblo (Colorado), Bentonville (Arkansas), Padukah (Kentucky) and in multiple communities in Minnesota, Colorado, California, and other places overlooked by national reporting.
The protesters against the brutal raids of the Border Patrol and ICE say they are defending their neighbors. “Compassion Melts ICE” is the message on one of the many similar signs.
This ethic does not depend on any pronouncement by anyone who is given transcendent authority by some. It is in vital ways inherent in the nature of social beings, and now (as long ago, on this very American soil) recognized as inherent in the interdependence of life on this planet, including what we do not normally consider as live beings.
The young woman protagonist of Tom Stoppard’s 2013 radio play “Darkside” wrote this:
“The earth is a common.
You can’t save it for yourself but
you can save it for others, and
the others will save it for you.
The other is us, and we are the
other. We are of a kind, we are
natural born to kindness, which
means to act to our kind, as
kin to kin, as kindred, which is
to act kindly. What is the Good?
It is nothing but a contest of kindness.”
What these protests show is that some of the ongoing expansion of what qualifies as "us" has taken root. They defend their neighbors.
The role of government as an agent of compassion representing the will of the nation goes back most conspicuously to President Lincoln, and in a new way was institutionalized during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who after his ground-breaking first term with the New Deal, accepted renomination in 1936 with these words: “Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.”
Indifference is the usual position of a conservative Republican regime, though since FDR, precedent has retained the decency that had been institutionalized. But the current presidency is not indifferent: it is pointedly, actively, aggressively and ferociously cruel, as well as shamelessly corrupt—which also has its costs to compassion, decency and justice. Instead of ice, we have ICE.
So millions of Americans this Christmas will worry deeply about the help withdrawn that will skyrocket their health care costs in the new year, on top of more expensive everything that results in nearly half of Americans struggling to pay for basic needs: food, shelter, energy, transportation, clothing as well as medical care.
Health insurance prices are sharply increasing but that’s perhaps just the start. I’ll suggest two things: that despite a record Black Friday, the Christmas shopping season will turn out to have been weak, and retailers and grocers who held back price increases in December will enact them in January.
Many people are turning their compassion for others as well as their own grievances into political action. Americans in the street are standing up for who they believe we are as a country, and they are saying that empathy, compassion, kindness and charity are part of that.
Though this needs no formal authorization or religious corroboration, it can be seen as an extension of the so-called Golden Rule, as expressed by Jesus. That mythos should mean something, especially this time of year.
