I was fascinated, and somewhat troubled lately by two diaries on the subject of terminally ill Republican congressman Charlie Norwood (GA-10), who has lost a gruesome battle with cancer and is now living out his final days. His sickness brings to the fore a question that haunts many of us: How do we respond?
Looking at the responses we have already offered, I find the answer is "Too easily." Many of us, having already made up our minds before hearing the question, give little thought to the deeper meaning of it. And that presents an ethical problem to our larger community, whose answer is anything but easy. Have a look at these diaries, if you like, and then join me below the fold:
Rep. Charlie Norwood (R, GA-10) is gravely ill; goes home to die
Please keep Rep. Norwood (Ga.) in your thoughts and/or prayers
I found a diversity of opinions in the comments of those diaries. Let me describe the more popular ones:
The largest group consisted of those who replied with sympathy. Some offered that sympathy unconditionally. Others qualified it with a lecture that ideological enmity and political posturing for Rep. Norwood’s seat are not appropriate in personal situations such as this.
Then there were the diplomats, people who did not necessarily have much sympathy to spare for an ideological enemy, but politely offered their condolences and, usually, made it a point to remind everyone that the politics over his seat could wait.
There were also a great many who rejected the idea that this man deserves our sympathy by drawing an equivalency between his fate and the fates of others. For instance, this man helped kill thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis purposelessly. Also for instance, this man helped seal the fates of poor Americans who don’t have medical insurance and, despite suffering comparable or worse illnesses, enjoy not a fraction of the medical care that Norwood does. Lastly, there were those who pointed out that Republicans have often jumped for joy when it is a Democrat who is going to die, so why spend our energy on a show of goodwill that will never be reciprocated?
And of course there were also the local gawkers, people whose failure to grasp the seriousness of the situation compelled them to displays of utter tactlessness. Many of them were keen on discussing Norwood’s congressional seat with little more than a cursory acknowledgement that the person currently in that seat is going to die soon.
Which of these four groups, if any, has the best answer? This is the discussion our community has yet to hold. Perhaps we can begin here. I personally want to begin by finding fault with much of what others have thus far said:
The people who reply with sympathy suffer, I think, from a large infiltration of posers. Many of these people, who espoused sympathy for Norwood, were actually trying to position themselves as morally upright and praiseworthy. I don’t want to single anybody out, because that isn’t the point of my diary, but if you read through the comments you will find no few instances of these fakers selling a message. Fortunately there is no liberal counterpart to Ronald Reagan’s eleventh commandment, so I am free to say that these people are as off-putting as the Christian fundamentalists whose holier-than-thou chicanery has brought great social injury to this nation.
Those who offer sympathy genuinely are not off the hook either. They are often guilty of a contradiction: We spend an incredible amount of energy here vilifying and denigrating right-wingers. Many of us get so caught up in the whirlwind as to develop genuine hatred toward these people. Markos leads the charge on this, attacking even the most decent Republicans simply because they are Republican—they are the enemy. Indeed, Daily Kos is a partisan Democratic site and our explicit purpose here, our raison d'être, is to win Democratic gains and inflict Republican losses. We are very zealous in that...and very sincere. But our sincerity has ramifications. Do you remember the old Looney Toons cartoons of Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf? They’d punch in the clock at work each morning, try to kill each other all day long, then punch out and be chums again in the evening. Is that us? Are we, as Democrats, simply fighting a political game against Republicans? Because that’s what it seems like when people come along and shout, "O, stop the game! Stop, stop! Charlie Norwood is hurt. We all have to stop right now and give him a big hug!" That is awfully cavalier.
So you see the problem. Or perhaps you don’t: If conservatives really do deserve all that shit we constantly talk about them, then unconditional sympathy is not an appropriate reply to the fate of somebody like Charlie Norwood. Sympathy itself is not the problem here, but we must qualify it with a stern reminder that this is a Bad Man, and the world is better off with him out of power and perhaps even dead. But many of us cannot stomach that kind of a statement, which leads to the contradiction I mentioned: We want to hate Republicans and yet not hate them at the same. We want to call them the scourge of all that is pure in the land, and yet pretend our differences are insignificant when one of them falls sick. That’s irresponsible! We can’t have it both ways. We have to choose. Very few of us at dKos or anywhere else (and I am not one of them) have been consistently willing to place mutual humanity over political ideology and treat Republicans as wayward friends rather than a true enemy. Indeed, people like that are often accused of trolling. The rest of us have to choose whether Republicans are the villains we paint them out to be, or our ideology is less important than we want to think.
I expect the truth is somewhere in the middle. Our ideology is important—they’re wrong, we’re right, and the Earth itself is at stake—but they are not pure evil either. And that means folks like Markos are guilty of propaganda. For instance, I joined the rest of you in condemning Bill Frist without a second thought when he led the Senate. I sneered in disgust at his video diagnosis of Terri Schiavo. But then, this past October, I read in the Seattle Times that Doctor Frist was truly one of the more incredible surgeons in our time. He was, for instance, the principal doctor who performed a very difficult combined heart-lung transplant in 1986 on a patient who is still alive today. And that was not his only good deed in life. Frist was wrong about Schiavo, wrong about almost everything he stood for in the Senate, but we were wrong to see him as a cartoon villain. And, now that we know that, we will be even more wrong to repeat this mistake of others in the future. Charlie Norwood’s terminal cancer gives us a chance to put our hateful rhetoric in perspective. I am probably one of the most liberal people on dKos, but I have always said that we have it within ourselves to look for the humanity in the people we oppose—especially in them, because who deserves it less? Who possesses less humanity than the enemy? That’s why they’re the enemy, yes? And if we can show justice and understanding to our enemies, then we are on the way to a better world.
Call it a hunch, blind superstition, but I doubt that most of the people who offered their honest sympathies to Rep. Norwood and his family and friends, gave much of a damn about him when he was in fine fettle. That’s hypocrisy. That’s called wanting to have your cake and eat it too—fighting Republicans on the clock, then trying to earn karma points by stopping the clock to hug them.
But it is not only the sympathy-givers with whom I find fault. There are still the other three groups—the diplomats, the haters, and the fools.
The diplomats are the worst of the bunch. They are the smarmy ones, who know full well that their words and actions are not honest, but undertake them anyway because they are more interested in propriety than honesty. These are the people who want to be popular, who want to make friends, who want their egos to be stroked, who prefer easy answers to real character-building. Where is their integrity?
I can’t stand people like that, especially in politics. For instance, this is why I have such a hard time swallowing the prospect of Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Both of them are so patently phony in their campaign rhetoric and jockeying that I am beside myself with consternation that so many people take them seriously. But no less repulsive in principle than national figures like Clinton and Edwards, are our own friends and neighbors here on dKos who play by the same stylebook. Who knows what these "diplomats" truly thought upon learning of Rep. Norwood’s grim condition? We may never know, because they won’t tell us. All they gave us were insincere condolences and, in some cases, a vow to hold off the political posturing for Norwood’s seat until the man’s body is a little more cold and a little more underground. If you have ever felt frustrated to the point of desperation by people who talk a lot without saying anything, you can understand how I feel now when these diplomat-types punt the Norwood question. This sort of intellectual dishonesty is a bane to any community that prides itself on open-minded and intelligent exposition of ideas.
Are we going to settle for that? For pseudo-diplomacy that spurns hard-hitting, soul-searching conversation? Hillary Clinton has seventy thousand reporters with three-and-a-half million video cameras reporting her every word. What’s your excuse?
Ah, and then there are the haters—the people who reject the idea of offering sympathy to Charlie Norwood by drawing equivalencies. If I were going to shoehorn myself into any of these four groups, it would have to be here. As I explained earlier, I don’t actually hate the man, but I was not all that interested in sympathizing with him and his friends and loved ones, either. After all, he’s a Republican. His voting record speaks for itself. Except...I had never really paid attention to that record. A venerable Kossack by the name of Rob did an outstanding bit of reporting when he commented in one of the aforementioned diaries that Rep. Norwood had been one of the only Republicans to fight for the Patients’ Bill of Rights. It was a fight he ultimately lost, and the Patients’ Bill of Rights ended up as a watered-down farce, but, like with Bill Frist’s grace as a surgeon, I was dazzled that it had never even occurred to me to ask whether this particular Republican, this man called Charlie Norwood, was any different from the rest.
Daily Kos has not been good for my mental health in this regard. Sometimes I even find myself resorting to the traditional media to try and balance some of the groupthink that flows around here in kool-aid sized cartons. Oh, please don’t take that as trolling—but don’t take it as a snark, either. We really do get carried away with ourselves sometimes. Too often. And the worst thing is, we seldom realize it at the time. I have a serious problem attacking people like Sen. Susan Collins with the same ferocity and no-holds-barred enmity as with which we attack the more odious Republicans like Sen. Tom Coburn.
The equivalency argument is very compelling: Why should we spend a single breath sympathizing with an enabler like Charlie Norwood when we have the blood of thousands of innocent civilians on our hands? Why should we give a damn about Charlie Norwood’s plight when he fought to deprive ordinary Americans of the same medical care he expects to enjoy himself?
Why? Because it is not that simple. It never is. That was what Rob’s comment showed me. That was the main lesson I hoped to bring to this diary tonight. Despite our preconceptions, the truth of the matter is that none but a handful of us knew two fucks about Charlie Norwood until he was already a goner—and we still don’t know just what kind of a congressman he was, let alone what kind of a person he was. How can we conscionably withhold an emotion like sympathy from somebody we don’t know, who is obviously suffering and soon to die?
Indeed, somebody who does know the man found fault with those who preferred political talk over sympathy for the man and his family.
We fancy that we can use our keen minds to understand other people. For shallow idiots like The Decider, that is certainly closer to the truth. But getting to know most human beings is more difficult than reading a dossier or looking for a party-affiliation symbol. Like all Republicans, Rep. Norwood tends to be on the wrong side of the issues. His brain is full of bad beliefs. His voting record is almost as sick as he is. His defense of this administration and of the formerly Republican Congress is inexcusable.
And yet...
And yet I have to sympathize with him. This is cancer. Terminal cancer. Most of us know somebody who has fought cancer and lived. Some of us know somebody who has fought cancer and died. A few of us have had to deal with it in our own bodies—and a great many of us someday will. At some point, there must be decency. And if somebody tells me, "Better to spend your thoughts on them than on a man like Norwood," my only possible reply would be, "I have thoughts enough for everyone." We’re human beings. We don’t run out of thoughts. We don’t have to divide our sympathy as though it were a finite pie. Our only limiting resource is time, and in the thirty seconds it took me to read the news blurb on Rep. Norwood’s condition, my thoughts were with him and his.
Now my thoughts are here, with Daily Kos, in the hope that we can have a more honest discussion about how people of good conscience should deal with the news that one of our political enemies is ghastly ill and soon to die. It is important to me that we have this discussion. I am a member of this community, and I don’t want my community to fail in its responsibility to be conscientious, well-reasoned, and principled in its actions.
Which brings me to the last group, the fools—the ones who dismissed this whole topic without even thinking about it. In short, we all share some guilt in that regard. Too often in life we allow ourselves to project hateful emotions onto other people or creatures simply because we know so little about them, and cannot empathize. I hope this diary can be put to good use in building a better understanding of what is truly going on here.
So here is my contribution to our community on this subject:
Rep. Charlie Norwood was wrong, dreadfully wrong, about a great many things. I am glad that somebody else will soon be holding his seat. But I sympathize with him, with his friends and family, and I wish him an easy departure from the plane of the living. I have no doubt in my mind that, despite all his beliefs and his foolish ideology, he was and still is...a fine person.
And now, once again, I must confess ignorance. This diary is not about my reply to the Norwood question. It is about yours. I want to hear your thoughts. I would like to see your points of view, and consider your arguments. I am going to bed, so I won’t have time to comment until Friday afternoon, but I do promise to read every single reply—and I hope that we all can benefit from putting our minds to this difficult topic.
Finally, please, do not feel beholden to agree with my perspective. For those who cannot find the sympathy within them to spare for a man like Norwood, I think that is okay. Sympathy is not required. Being sympathetic earns you no points. It simply means you are attuned to someone, or something. For those who find too much damning strength in the equivalency between Norwood’s fate and the fates of others that he helped seal, I think that is okay as well. For those who want to talk about Norwood’s seat, again—okay! Every Congressional seat is important, regardless of the circumstances of the person holding it. After all, aren’t we so fond of saying that the office is higher than the person? And, for those whose sympathy is unconditional, if you do not have a problem reconciling your antipathy for conservatives with your empathy for this particular conservative, Charlie Norwood, then...okay. The only requirement is that everyone bring to the table a reason for their line of thinking.
Let’s talk about that.
