On Saturday I told an acquaintance that I had been crying on and off hourly for a few days.
I had just run into her in the store, and realized that I missed her, and was happy to reconnect. (I have to mention that I am white, and so is this friend.) She asked how I was or how I had been, and I told her. She changed her look and said, “You mean about the election?” and the look she changed to was skepticism/irritation/contempt. So I countered with a face-saving, “Yeah, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” and got away as best I could.
I cry when I think about the direction it seems the world is now headed. I cry when I think about the strength of people to endure the suffering this election brings, or the willingness I see in friends to stand up for their fellows. And I cry when I think about the great Tribes and their historic stand against the desecration of the earth in the form of the DAPL, and the frustration I feel over how President Obama has failed us in this, with the pipeline now freely rolling over people; especially how with his ease and grace he is handing the keys of the country to a man who has sworn to drive us off the cliff. But I can cry for him too, and how lucky we were to have had him when we did, and how hard it was and is for him, how thankful I am that he was president.
But such crying is stupid. I know it. Picture two people facing off. One says, “I am suffering because I see others suffering.” The other sneers, “Grow up. Get over it.”
Who wins? You see what happens to the sympathetic one: the comment is a stab to the heart. He said, “I suffer because of the lack of sympathy in people,” and the person he is confiding to is one of those people he is suffering over. Naturally he loses. Sympathy loses. The hard person gets harder, and the soft person gets harder.
How many soft little boys and girls have been hardened up by their mommies and daddies, or by their hardened schoolmates, and beaten or ridiculed until they also became hard? How has anyone ever survived their youth with their softness intact? I do not know.
But this is always the result. Put sympathy and hardness together, and sympathy never wins. It is always shown to be ridiculous. I cry less today than I did yesterday, because I am a little harder, which then makes me sad thinking of all the softness in the world that is getting hard this week. Sadness does not necessarily make one more sympathetic; it can also make one depressed and hardened.
Yet, however unlikely, sympathy (and even empathy) exists. I know the “biological” reason: We stood upright. Long ago, our mammal ancestors stood up. We could run, reach, throw, better that way. But the pelvis had to support the entire trunk now (unlike in other mammals), which required the pelvic bones to grow dimensionally, which made the birth canal shrink. We are born too soon because of this, are too soft and too small to live without sympathy. We need a sympathetic mom, first of all, to hold us and adore us, and mom will need lots of adult support (sympathy) finishing up our embryonic development outside of her body while we grow in her arms. Without sympathy, we all couldn’t stand up.
When we look at our human history, our civic history of warfare and class systems and slavery, we see an obvious arc of greater and greater sympathy in the human race. You think the world is a hard place now? Take a look at any other time any place on earth. We have been simply horrid, horrid, to each other since the beginning, only ever extending sympathy to those directly of our blood and who looked nearly identical to us (us meaning any of us, anywhere). Now, with a wider view, if I could get far enough away in time to see past and future, I believe I would see that we are maybe about half way toward a Star Trek ‘Federation of Planets’ level of social harmony, with Cave Man at the other end of the arc: about half way there or even more, I’m pretty sure.
But for now, here we are in the middle of that long arc. Since I am soft, I tend to have soft friends, and most of them are hurt this week. Of course, people say we will survive this new president, and to the extent that “we” means “The country,” perhaps they are right; but minorities have not done so well by presidents of the past, even including white minorities (LGBTQ). The people who have the least to worry now, who have always had the least to worry about surviving in this country, are generally the ones saying we all should get over this and give the man a chance. This is hard.
When I see white people, I now assume they are okay with how this is all going, and I don’t talk about it. About 60% of white voters, men and women, were okay with voting for that man, meaning they were okay with racism, okay with climate change, okay with intimidation. When I feel sick and lost I go out to a protest, just to see who will be there, and am so thankful to find people, especially white people, saying that this is not what they had hoped for. It really helps to see you are not the only sap in the world. The protestors know they won’t change anything, but they also know it is wrong not to mourn the loss of whatever it was we just lost. We’re trying to hang on to our softness, or at least I am.
It’s obvious that even just this election itself hurts minorities, but being white and hurt I must say there are millions of white people who somehow stayed soft enough in this hard world to be hurt this week. Why would racism by whites hurt people who are not the victims of that racism? I think this is new and hopeful. My knowing that others care, and you knowing that I care, will perhaps keep us sappy and soft a little longer. I hope so.
