The slaughter continues.
My wonderful wife, Sally, stopped me dead in my tracks yesterday when she informed me that elementary school children were killed in Texas. Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas is now likely known to most Americans. That is where 19 children and two adults were murdered. I've tried to explain reasons for mass shootings to my overseas colleagues who are just as perplexed as I am for why killings continue with little to no action taken to prevent future killings. I wrote a blog piece after Sandy Hook in late 2012. I wrote another blog piece in early 2018 after Stoneman Douglas. I doubt the words I write in this blog piece will add much to what I've already written, but I'll attempt a slightly different angle.
Webster's second definition for "empathy" is: the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner. As a parent of two incredible daughters, it takes no effort for me to empathize with the parents who lost their children yesterday. It also takes zero effort for me to empathize with those who regret that yesterday's perpetrator had been killed, only so that something worse -- more painful -- could happen to that evil individual. But I predict that it is impossible for me to empathize with yesterday's shooter, even though I know next to nothing about him. I am not wired for "vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, ..." of someone who enters a school and opens fire.
I suspect that nothing in my previous paragraph is especially disagreeable. Let me change that. I struggle mightily to empathize with those who love guns. I've held various opinions on that topic during more than half a century of life. The empathy I feel for a parent whose child was murdered is effortless for me to experience. Most of the time, though, empathy is hard. Empathy requires effort and, sometimes, a lot of work.
I own a .30-06 Savage rifle that sits in a gun cabinet about 200 miles (as the crow flies) from my home. I hunted with my family for a few years, mostly in an effort to understand hunting culture. I enjoyed it. My family loved deer meat, and I felt better about eating deer I killed than I did eating meat that came from factory farms. I've been a vegetarian for over five years, but the reason for that choice has nothing to do with guns. I've no interest in hunting because of my diet choice. But I also have no interest in the rifle I own. And here is where empathy is hard for me. Regardless of conversations with hundreds of gun enthusiasts over several decades, much study on the history of guns in America, and my own experience of owning a gun, I've been incapable of empathizing with those who adore guns. Facebook friends have recently posted the need to arm teachers, and despite my best efforts, I cannot get my mind in a place where I could ever imagine the efficaciousness of such a strategy. I wouldn't bat an eye if I had to give up my gun as part of a national effort to eliminate gun use. I understand that there are those who will read that previous sentence and be unable to empathize with me.
Far from being the first to point this out, people are tribal. Social media, with it's headlines-only approach to disseminating news, is but part of the reason why diametric sides of an issue are on opposite sides of a vast chasm that used to be filled with nuance. Like empathy, nuance requires a lot of work. Reading long articles and books, talking to people from all walks of life, and spending serious time cogitating in a sans-cell-phone environment are just some of the ways people begin to develop nuanced views.
Consider the following 10 questions.
- Do you believe in a god?
- Should abortion be legal?
- Should capital punishment be legal?
- Should research be performed on stem cells?
- Do you think animals should be killed for food if non-animal food options are readily available?
- Do you support Donald Trump?
- Should torture ever be used during an interrogation?
- Should private citizens of adult age be allowed to own guns?
- Should marijuana use by private citizens of adult age be legal?
- Do you support government-funded, universal healthcare?
Perhaps my biases have been partially revealed by the way I asked each question even though I tried to pose questions that did not suggest a preferred answer. Does asking "Should abortion be legal?" imply something different about me compared to asking "Should abortion be illegal?" I've no idea. Each of the above questions is meant to evoke an immediate "yes" or "no" answer. But I can imagine objections to insisting on binary responses. Those objections would be founded in desires for nuance. Any one of my questions could occupy classroom discussions during a semester-long course, and entire books could be, and have been, devoted to addressing my questions. If you had to answer "yes" or "no" to my questions, could you do so? My guess is that most people could, even though they would be yearning to offer slews of caveats.
Now for a simple math question. What is the number 2 raised to the 10th power? It won't be hard to come up with 1024. Because each of my 10 questions sought only a "yes" or "no" answer, there are 1024 distinct ways of answering those questions. That means if you and a thousand people answer my questions, there is a chance, albeit vanishingly small, that each one of you could have a unique set of answers. And if you feel passionate about each of your 10 responses, you could look upon the answers given by the other thousand people -- and want nothing to do with each and every one of those people.
Yesterday was 24 May 2022, the 144th day of the year. The massacre in Texas was the 27th school shooting this year. That's one school shooting per 5 days and 8 hours. How does this problem get solved when tribalism reigns supreme, nuance is all but gone, and empathy is hard to come by? I know people who would have nothing to do with me if they were aware that my answer to a particular question on my list differs from theirs. How does someone in the pro-gun culture talk to a person who wants to eliminate guns? Sure, they likely agree that shooting children is evil, but neither might be able to empathize with the other on what to do with guns. The traditional political spectrum has been replaced with a Möbius strip; left and right meet at a twisted point behind the part of the spectrum where nuance used to sit.
While people shout at each other, try to cancel each other, and refuse to do the hard work of empathizing with each other, the slaughter continues.
