Four years ago, twelve-year-old Deamonte Driver died from an abscessed tooth. The family was on Medicaid, but his mother couldn’t find a dentist who would accept Medicaid, and then there was a temporary lapse in their Medicaid status. Dealing with the Medicaid bureaucracy was confusing and time consuming, but eventually Deamonte did get in to see a dentist, who referred him to an oral surgeon. Unfortunately the oral surgeon couldn’t see Deamonte for another two months. In the meantime, the bacteria spread from the tooth to his brain, and he died.
I read about this in the Washington Post. Hearing that a child has died under any circumstance is sad, and knowing that this was a death that could have been prevented is infuriating. But my reaction was more than that. As a mother, I related to Alyce Driver, Deamonte’s mother. I thought about the frustration of trying to deal with a bureaucracy that I was unprepared to deal with while my son struggled with the pain. I understood the helplessness she must have felt in not being able to convince a dentist to even look at her son because she didn’t have money or insurance. I thought about how awful I would feel if one of my sons had been suffering and I couldn’t get help for him. What I felt was a small bit of the pain that Alyce Driver felt. Of course what she felt was infinitely worse, and she couldn’t block it out or compartmentalize the pain because she was seeing her son suffer 24 hours a day. This feeling I had -- the capacity to share feelings that are being experienced by another person – is empathy.
Deamonte died in Prince George’s County in Maryland. Feeling a need to share this story with my greater community, I posted this on the messageboard I read most frequently, The Baltimore Sun Messageboard. I expected other members would post messages expressing similar feelings of sympathy for the mother and agreement that a system that would allow a 12 year old boy to suffer in pain is broken.
The reaction on the messageboard was stunning. While a few others shared my feelings, any discussion of sympathy was drowned out by antipathy. Most felt that the mother was at fault, and the commonly expressed idea was that she should have given her son a toothbrush. There was anger in general toward the family because they were on Medicaid, which the posters felt was using the hard earned money they paid in taxes, and a vigilance against any more of their money going to help such “good-for-nothings.”
Overwhelmed by the fury, I retreated from the thread. It puzzled me how people could feel so differently from the way I felt.
After that experience, I was not terribly surprised by the opposition to the Affordable Health Care Legislation last year. I saw this battle played out in the national arena with the republicans and democrats in Congress, and I also saw it played out on the Baltimore Sun Messageboard, the usual conservative/right wing voices yelling out that this legislation was going to make their own health insurance premiums go up and it wasn’t right, people who didn’t have health insurance needed to go out and get jobs with insurance, or better yet, pay for their own insurance out of pocket.
I have a friend whose first wife died of cancer and now his current wife of 13 years has cancer. Fortunately they are covered by the company’s health insurance, but no job is 100% secure, and he and his wife are in their early 60s, a few years off from Medicare.
My friend was very pro-health insurance legislation. His brother, a staunch republican, was not. At a family dinner last year, there was a heated family discussion about the proposed legislation. His brother said that other people without health insurance was not his problem. My friend brought up how his wife would be in jeopardy of going without treatment if he lost his job. His brother countered that that wasn’t true, she could always go to the emergency room. My friend countered that if her only recourse was the emergency room, she would be dead by now. The argument escalated, and their mother lamented, “Why can’t you boys get along?”
This incident added to my understanding of what I consider the basic difference between democrats and republicans. The difference, is, simply put, that we (democrats) feel empathy very strongly, and republicans don’t.
Democrats feel empathy for the mother of a dying child they read about in the newspaper. Republicans feel empathy for their immediate families. I’m sure that the majority are good family men/women, and would do anything for their children, their wives, and probably for their aging parents. Beyond that, I’m sure it’s a matter of degree. Probably some republicans would feel a personal involvement for their brothers’ families, enough for them to see that the system absolutely had to be changed so that the sister-in-law’s medical treatment would never be compromised. I suspect that my friends’ mother would have felt more emotional involvement if it had been her son rather than daughter-in-law whose medical treatment was in jeopardy.
Last February, Jim Bunning blocked a proposal for an extension of unemployment insurance, COBRA, and other federal programs. Bunning felt infinitely worse about missing his basketball game than he did about the millions of unemployed going without the checks they needed to keep food and shelter for their families. At the time that seemed like an aberration even within the republican members of Congress.
Later last year, the republicans in congress – every one of them – proved that Bunning wasn’t an aberration when they held the unemployment extension hostage until Obama and the democrats caved and extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy.
While we might not all agree that the democrats in Congress and President Obama did the right thing in passing that legislation, we can understand their unwillingness to let the unemployed go without their checks. How could a good democrat sleep at night knowing that his vote was going to cause millions of unemployed to struggle just to hold onto their homes through Christmas season.
The capacity to feel empathy for others that we are not related to, not in personal contact with, is what aligns me with other democrats. It is also our weakness. Republicans lack of empathy is what makes them so powerful. You can’t play chicken with republicans – they’ll always win because they really don’t care who gets hurt.