Searching for Empathy

Never in my lifetime has public leadership been so needed or so lacking. We are living in a paradox where a pandemic, a crisis if you’d prefer, is impacting a vast majority and at the same time only impacting a thin minority.

We easily know how we’re impacted; businesses closed, jobs lost, jobs furloughed, massive debt, economic restructuring (online way up, bricks and mortar way down), restricted mobility, families split, savings exhausted, and so on. But what about the sickness and death, or the overworked, endangered healthcare workers? Not so much impact there.

Take my home state of Virginia as an example. As reported in the New York Times May 22, Virginia has reported a total of 34,137 confirmed cases of Corona infection which has resulted in 1,099 deaths. Put another way, 1 out of every 250 Virginians has been diagnosed with the Corona virus and 1 out of every 7,700 had died from COVID19. 

The chances that any given uninfected Virginian knows someone who has been infected is remote. Knowing someone who gets seriously ill even more so. Knowing someone who has died from it becomes minute. If you skew those numbers by removing those sickened or died in nursing homes and prisons, populations which Americans have a shameful way of discounting by easily forgoing compassion, it is no wonder why people cannot “feel” the effect of the actual disease in a personal way. In most other states it is even more so.

Nationally, there are about 300,000 nurses working in critical care, or about 1 out of every 1000 Americans. Doctors number far less. The number of those nurses who get infected amounts to 1 out of about 22,000 Americans. Exact numbers are not known, but these are reasonable estimates.

The bottom line is this: of those Americans rebelling against economic restrictions, mobility restrictions, and behavioral directions, the vast majority has had no direct, personal experiences with the disease itself…devastation for a few, a news stream for the rest.

Initially the prospect of getting terribly sick and even dying generated enough fear to curb the behavior of most people. Living a confined lifestyle felt more like participation in a greater effort. Then communications from the Federal Government became disjointed, rambling, contradictory, or even bombastic.

In time there became an almost carnival believability to the predictions and estimates. With no plan for everyone, we began to watch fifty different plans evolve, mostly piecemeal in States that were being infected at different rates and at different times. Now we're seeing it again as restrictions are removed.

Only three weapons were disbursed to fight this invisible enemy and late at that; keep distance between yourself and others, wash your hands, and don’t touch your face. The importance greatly depended on what television network a person watched. It was good advice, but for many it did not feel commensurate with the social upheaval.

If you were deemed a person at risk for COVID19 mortality then the dire nature of the messages (or at least some of the messages) made the sequestered times seem even more uncertain. If you were a person considered not at risk, the sacrifices (liberty, mobility, economic security e.g.) began to appear excessive as one’s individual situation was weighed against amorphous predictions.

The incompetence of Trump only widened our already polar political and social divisions. Medical directions or even the entire Pandemic itself has become attached to political conspiracies or infringements of “patriotic” liberties.  Liberal obsession with the past and future dire consequences of Trump’s ineptitude only exasperated the disconnect between what is and what should be.

Real leadership finds a middle ground between fear and blind trust. For example, we have known since December that an airborne, person to person virus was loose in the world. If an American President had only prepared the nation to make the initial, simple sacrifice of wearing masks in confined public spaces and other large gathering the consequences of the virus would have been substantially reduced, both health and economic.

Now today wearing or not wearing a mask has political considerations. How crazy is that?

Leadership can help people understand something they can’t feel, to empathize when experience provides no basis for empathy. It’s done with honesty, humility, responsibility, and by example. It could have made small but critical sacrifices not a restriction of individual liberty, but an enhancement to it.