I had not been in Vietnam long when the first morning after row of dead Viet Cong sappers were lined up in a row for local village officials to come identify. A grotesque sight of shattered bodies. Broken bones snapped by machinegun fire poking through skin and intestines in plain view. AND THEY WERE YOUNG. Child soldiers. Empathy came t…
I had not been in Vietnam long when the first morning after row of dead Viet Cong sappers were lined up in a row for local village officials to come identify. A grotesque sight of shattered bodies. Broken bones snapped by machinegun fire poking through skin and intestines in plain view. AND THEY WERE YOUNG. Child soldiers. Empathy came to me. "Their mothers are waiting for them." So was mine. It wasn't just a matter of them having come to kill me. It was empathy I could not have as a Marine. Most disturbing, over fifty years later empathy vanishes at times when inappropriate. My excuse for "fuck him/her/them anyway" when I lack the empathy that I think should accompany human goodness. I have no control over when it decides to visit or abandon me. Or so I like to think. Perhaps an excuse, perhaps an unhealed wound.
That was one of those life events burned into my memory, but how different is it from the empathy fatigue affecting us all in this time of tribal hatred. I see it in comments on the internet. An implicit "fuck them" that shouldn't be. The slow creep of empathy fatigue. I never hated my enemy, and we were truly trying to kill each other. Hate is an emotion like empathy. I turned that off too. At times. But I think I see it too often in matters as absurd as partisan politics. The internet can be a curse. It magnifies things beyond proportion and sometimes brings out the worst in us.
Sometimes it also manifests in a live and let live tolerance that is inappropriate or an inappropriate intolerance when emotion sets off our fight reflex. A mess of contradictions. Is the internet making all that worse? It is a tool, like a gun. It can be used for good or bad purpose. You are better at that than me (using the internet as a useful and constructive tool), and I commend you for it. Excuse my "French" in this comment, but those words belonged there because of their honesty.
You make a really important point here. As you say it's in that warlike mindset where empathy is hardest to find. And we truly treat those with different perspectives to us as if we're at war lately. I think we've all noticed how the same people preaching kindness can justify the most incredible cruelty and abuse when it's directed at "the other side."
Sadly, at leats online, some people haven't learned, as you have, to turn off the hate.
Someone sent the link I'll put at the bottom to me, and it was a wakeup call about being able to turn off hate. The vile woman with hate on her face spitting in her political opposite's face flashed me back to the warm welcome home Vietnam veterans received from activists like her.
At this point in my life, I can understand their protest, but I have never really gotten past the emotional response I have toward people like her. I'm wildly in favor of abortion if she will abort her every pregnancy and remove herself from the gene pool. I don't say that proudly, I'm ashamed that I haven't gotten past it after all these years. But it illustrates how hate filled activists make things worse. My thoughts on this have nothing to do with my thoughts on the causes of the two groups, that is irrelevant.
I had not been in Vietnam long when the first morning after row of dead Viet Cong sappers were lined up in a row for local village officials to come identify. A grotesque sight of shattered bodies. Broken bones snapped by machinegun fire poking through skin and intestines in plain view. AND THEY WERE YOUNG. Child soldiers. Empathy came to me. "Their mothers are waiting for them." So was mine. It wasn't just a matter of them having come to kill me. It was empathy I could not have as a Marine. Most disturbing, over fifty years later empathy vanishes at times when inappropriate. My excuse for "fuck him/her/them anyway" when I lack the empathy that I think should accompany human goodness. I have no control over when it decides to visit or abandon me. Or so I like to think. Perhaps an excuse, perhaps an unhealed wound.
That was one of those life events burned into my memory, but how different is it from the empathy fatigue affecting us all in this time of tribal hatred. I see it in comments on the internet. An implicit "fuck them" that shouldn't be. The slow creep of empathy fatigue. I never hated my enemy, and we were truly trying to kill each other. Hate is an emotion like empathy. I turned that off too. At times. But I think I see it too often in matters as absurd as partisan politics. The internet can be a curse. It magnifies things beyond proportion and sometimes brings out the worst in us.
Sometimes it also manifests in a live and let live tolerance that is inappropriate or an inappropriate intolerance when emotion sets off our fight reflex. A mess of contradictions. Is the internet making all that worse? It is a tool, like a gun. It can be used for good or bad purpose. You are better at that than me (using the internet as a useful and constructive tool), and I commend you for it. Excuse my "French" in this comment, but those words belonged there because of their honesty.
You make a really important point here. As you say it's in that warlike mindset where empathy is hardest to find. And we truly treat those with different perspectives to us as if we're at war lately. I think we've all noticed how the same people preaching kindness can justify the most incredible cruelty and abuse when it's directed at "the other side."
Sadly, at leats online, some people haven't learned, as you have, to turn off the hate.
Someone sent the link I'll put at the bottom to me, and it was a wakeup call about being able to turn off hate. The vile woman with hate on her face spitting in her political opposite's face flashed me back to the warm welcome home Vietnam veterans received from activists like her.
At this point in my life, I can understand their protest, but I have never really gotten past the emotional response I have toward people like her. I'm wildly in favor of abortion if she will abort her every pregnancy and remove herself from the gene pool. I don't say that proudly, I'm ashamed that I haven't gotten past it after all these years. But it illustrates how hate filled activists make things worse. My thoughts on this have nothing to do with my thoughts on the causes of the two groups, that is irrelevant.
Today in Phoenix. https://twitter.com/StudentsForKari/status/1522041997653012480
Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also; I went hunting wild
After the wildest beauty in the world
. . .
I am the enemy you killed, my friend.
I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.
I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.
Let us sleep now. . . .
—Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47395/strange-meeting