A few years ago, I was working with a small foundation to help with their organizational culture. Like most foundations and nonprofits, this place had a pretty deeply embedded culture of “niceness.” They avoided direct conflict or disagreement whenever possible, and created an elaborate system of unofficial work-arounds to protect feelings (allegedly, everyone’s feelings; but mostly the feelings of the people in charge). In one of my staff sessions with them, employees further down the ladder shared how this culture forced them to suffer in silence, since it branded all of their concerns and disagreements as “divisive” and “unproductive,” and cut off any means to share productive feedback. I felt (and still feel!) so proud of these workers. Saying “what you’re doing is hurting me” takes courage even when the power dynamic between the two of you doesn’t impact your continued employment.
Disappointingly, predictably, someone had to dump cold water over everything. In this case, it was their HR manager, who said “I just feel so sorry for our CEO, having to hear all of this negative feedback like this. It must be very hard.” And reader? Let. me. tell. YOU. I had to reach deep into my facilitator bag of tricks to not flip a table over in my frustration that the HR manager of all people was so clearly announcing her allegiances. Instead, I said “I really appreciate the empathy you’re able to bring into this conversation. I want to encourage you to also bring it for the people who risked a lot to share this feedback in the first place, and who are now having to hear you process it as an attack on the person who is harming them.”
We operate in a society that demands that we empathize with the people who have and harm the most. At the same time, this society demonizes empathy towards the people who have the least and suffer the most. “Bleeding heart liberal” was the dismissive moniker I grew up hearing. Now it’s “woke mind virus,” which is even stupider. The through-line is that something must be wrong with you if you think that a poor person, or a Black person, or a queer person, deserves to be treated with humanity; and if you don’t think that a CEO’s feelings are sacrosanct.
The same people who want us to prioritize their feelings and call their virulent bigotry a “difference of opinion” now want to dictate what “political violence” means. So “political violence” is not U.S. residents being kidnapped by violent, masked thugs on behalf of a would-be dictator. It’s not a nation massacring hundreds of thousands of people through bombings, shootings, starvation, and dehydration to defend its right to be an ethnostate. It’s not children getting gunned down through a church window. It’s not a politician and her family being murdered in their home. It’s not Black academics who get harassment and death threats for doing their job.
No, the only thing they count as political violence is one man who was close to the president being shot to death—the price he himself deemed necessary to preserve the Second Amendment, as long as people he didn’t see as human were paying it.
Except, of course, that everything I listed above is political violence. And it is violence, too, to demand that we, the people who this administration and its mouthpieces deem less than human, empathize with one of them now. And it’s especially violent to tie that empathy to our ability to stay in this country.
But here’s the thing: my empathy is too precious to be devalued and manipulated in this way. And my ability to empathize, to genuinely honour the humanity in other people, is what keeps me human. So right now, I choose to spend that empathy on the families whose grief has been dismissed, derided, and drowned out by people who accuse them of “politicizing” the murder of their loved ones. I choose to spend it on the people who are fleeing their homes because America isn’t safe for them anymore. I choose to spend my empathy on the people who need it.
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