Do we care? We see the reports. Thousands dead here, hundreds there, a couple somewhere. Bombings in London, tidal waves in Shangri La, military troops killed every day. We see the pictures, hear the reports. Sometimes something is so grave we shudder. High-schooler kills friends and family on graduation morning. “My god. What is the world coming to?” we ask before folding up the paper and driving the suburban to the office listening to some morning talk show. What is this malaise that has settled over our country? Is it man’s nature not to care? Or is it just an American way of life?
I was attacked by a dog two weeks ago and on instinct had jumped in my car and headed to someplace safe. It didn’t dawn on me until the world went yellow, that my body was going into shock and if I passed out behind the wheel I would have more trouble than the puncture wound in my hand. It was raining and the top was broken on my car. In my typical defiance of all matters ridiculous in our society, I refused to pay the $6,000 to replace it when the car itself was only worth $6,000. As the world swam before me, I decided better wet than dead and pulled over.
I laid my seat back, the world coming in and out of focus as the cold sweats took over my body, quaking in that horrible, nauseating, light-headed feeling as consciousness battles with unconsciousness. I heard a car stop and a voice call out, “Miss, are you okay?” A middle-aged gentleman was walking up to my car, being careful to circle and come from the front so as not to startle me. I must have been a sight. - pale white, hand bleeding, eyes half-lidded, laying in the driver’s seat of a convertible with the top down in the rain. “I was attacked by a dog,” I managed to mumble, “was going to faint, had to pull over, I’m, I’m okay.” I reached for the dignity we try to show in the face of strangers that we are fine, just fine, but I didn’t have the strength to pretend.
He was next to the door now, but I couldn’t open my eyes enough to focus. “Would you like some water,” he asked. Such kindness in that voice. “Yes, yes, water.” What is that desert-like thirst that comes over us in shock? He disappeared for a moment and came back with a bottle of water. He cradled my head lifting it as I put the water to my lips to drink, then gently laid my head back and stroked my hair. His caress was so very genuine, filled with compassion and caring. I finally could open my eyes and seeing his eyes smiling at me whispered, “thank you”.
He stood next to my car, stroking my hair, and replied, “This is what we are supposed to do. This is what we are here for. To care for each other. To take care of each other.”
I truly felt in that moment that he was an angel descended from heaven. His presence was so comforting, so soothing, so filled with love for another human being. He asked if I wanted to sit in his car as the rain was coming down harder. I wasn’t sure I could stand up without fainting and, probably more significantly, couldn’t ignore a lifetime of propaganda that people can’t be trusted and you should never get in a stranger’s car – even if you thought they were an angel sent from above.
Instead he went to his car and returned with an umbrella. He stood next to my car holding an umbrella over my head as the rain poured down on my broken convertible. He teased, “Don’t you wish you had a picture of this moment?!” “Ah” I responded, “if you only knew how many moments like this there are in my life! It would make quite the scrapbook!” He stayed with me, protecting me from the rain, holding my head as I drank his water, tenderly stroking my hair, until the friend I had called arrived.
Every time someone is mean to me, or short, or cross I see his face now. Smiling eyes looking down from above under the patter of rain on an umbrella. He is humanity to me. Not the cold, cruel people hiding their sad desperation behind a mask of anger. He was right, we are here to take care of each other. So why, why don’t we? Why are we so caught up in our own little lives? Do we just not care? Is he different for what he feels inside or was he the only person who upon being concerned did something about it?
It is now two weeks later. I just watched less than an hour of the movie “Sometimes in April” about the Hutu uprising in Rwanda before having to turn the movie off and the phone on. “How can we do this to each other?!” I cried out to my friend on the other line. “They couldn’t even tell who was who to know who to kill. They had to look on lists. They didn’t practice different religions, didn’t have a different belief sets, they were just born of a different lineage a century ago. They couldn’t even tell each other apart but they could kill whoever wasn’t of their lineage. How can we do this?! How can we continue to do this to each other?!”
My friend has heard me go into these furies before. Trying to calm me down was pointless, despite the gum surgery I just had and the fact I wasn’t supposed to talk. He mostly listened, occasionally making a point. “Man has always killed,” he said, “for money, for power, for religion, for land, for differences in philosophy, in looks, in beliefs.” “I know, but why?! Why can’t we see how absurd it is?!” In a plaintive wail ever so reminiscent of my teenage daughter in the backseat of our mini-van when her sister and brother were fighting, I cried, “Why can’t we all just get along!”
It breaks my heart, truly breaks my heart that we continue to judge those different from ourselves at all, much less that we continue to kill them for no reason but their differences. We talked on of senseless slayings, of the often senseless political responses, assuming there was first a self-interest in responding at all, and of our response in this society. “I doubt most people in America even know what happened in Rwanda,” he declared. “Most people just don’t care.”
That sentence stopped me in my tiger-like pacing back and forth in the dark. Most people just don’t care. Could that be true? But we do care. Don’t we? We must care. The image of the kind stranger standing next to my car holding an umbrella to protect me from the rain flashed through my mind. I know we care. Inside every person is empathy for every suffering human being. We are born with it. It is hard-wired into us. You see someone bang their toe and your toe hurts. You watch a pretend surgery on TV and you wince as the knife enters the skin. Why do you think we cry at movies? We feel what other people feel – even when we know they are acting! Other people’s experiences are a vehicle for our own emotions – we feel for them because somewhere inside, no matter how many differences, we are them and we know it.
So why this malaise in our country? What has happened to rewire our circuits? Why can we react to movies but not to thousands of senseless deaths half-way around the world? I don’t think it is that we don’t care. I think we are paralyzed. You slice the arm of a paraplegic, he will just lay there. His body may be perfectly capable of fighting you off but his mind can’t tell his body how. Fortunately, for him his body can’t tell his mind about the pain either. The only thing worse than not being able to protect oneself is having to feel the pain of that which you can’t protect against.
We are like that, we Americans. The press feeds us fear for breakfast and dinner everyday. We can’t walk alone at night, can’t leave our children at the bus-stops, can’t trust our priests, our teachers, our police. The average person in our society makes the majority of his or her decisions based on fear, not knowledge, not desire, fear, and the press gives us more than enough to be scared about. We are scared to stop and help each other.
I remember when I was a child I couldn’t wait until I got old enough to hitchhike across America, for back then people really did. If you didn’t have money for a bus or a train you could count on the kindness of strangers. Not today. Today you are a fool if you hitchhike and a fool if you pick someone up. Neither one trusts the other. Why? Did the nature of people change or our perception? I know this, perception is easier to change than the nature of man. But how long before the perception becomes the reality? The new physics says we create our reality by what we expect. If that is true, what will come of a country that lives in fear - fear of the dark, fear of the unknown, fear of each other? Won’t we bring to pass the very things we fear?
And then there is this growing sense of helplessness. Why do you think people don’t vote? It’s not because we don’t care. Of course we care. It’s because we don’t think our vote will make a difference. We don’t believe we can affect our world. This insidious amorphous entity simply referred to as “The System” now feeds upon itself and us and we are helpless against it. We don’t even know what It is. To fight it is like battling a nameless, formless dragon of mist.
I have always been a fighter. When I was young my grandma would tease me that I would argue with a post about where it was standing. When a company made a mistake – an overcharge on a credit card, an absurd provision in a boiler plate contract, a mistake by a CSR, a promise unfulfilled – I would fight until they corrected it. I knew for every person who said there was nothing they could do, there was a person above them somewhere who had the authority to remedy the situation. I would take it up and up the corporate ladder until the issue was resolved. Now there is no corporate ladder, there is a corporate whirlpool. Nobody has the authority to fix anything.
The night of the dog bite, for just $491 at the local emergency room, I was given pain pills, a tetanus shot, and x-rays and told by the doctor who never even touched my hand to run it under water while pressing all around the wound. I thought it was odd no one cleaned it or disinfected it, but I had never had a puncture wound to the bone and thought it was just treated differently. The doctor told me that normally they prescribe an anti-biotic in case of infection but he wanted me to come back in thirty-six hours so he could look at it and make sure it wasn’t infected. After five hours, a Lortab, and two Motrin, anything made sense to me.
The next day as my hand swelled to the size of a plum and turned bright red it became rather apparent it was infected. A doctor friend, appalled that the wound hadn’t even been cleaned, told me I absolutely had to get on antibiotics that night or I would risk losing my hand. He couldn’t prescribe the antibiotic for fear he would lose his license if I lost my hand because of the first doctor’s mistake. I called the emergency room but was told even though antibiotics were standard protocol for dog bites and even though the doctor had indicated I would need antibiotics if it became infected, they couldn’t prescribe them unless I came in again. So the night of July 4th I went back to the emergency room along with the firecracker fools and dozens of people injured in a riot downtown.
Every nurse and technician, with genuine compassion, agreed it really was absurd that I would be stuck there until the morning waiting for a doctor to look at my pulsating, red, plum sized hand to prescribe an antibiotic that should have been prescribed the night before but there was just “nothing they could do.” I spoke to yet another counter person in yet another waiting area. “It’s crazy, yeah, but that’s the way the system works,” she said. “But don’t you understand? I can lose my hand if I don’t get on antibiotics now!” I pleaded. “ I’m sorry but there is nothing I can do, you’ll just have to wait.”
When she told me it would be morning before a doctor could see me, I demanded I be released and my records reflect I had been told I wouldn’t be seen until morning. I may as well give my body the night’s sleep and go to an urgent care in the morning. She did a quick back peddle, declaring she hadn’t said it would be morning for sure after all it could just be twenty minutes. I was told I could walk out but they would not discharge me. I was charged $100 for that visit – oh, well I guess they did take my blood pressure and temperature.
Who was this System protecting? It certainly wasn’t protecting me or my hand at that moment. And why did no one have the authority to exercise judgment to do the right thing? Because The System had taken that judgment away and what do they have instead of authority? Fear. My doctor friend cared, but what could he do? He couldn’t risk his license. The nurses cared, but what could they do? They were just nurses.
I cried walking home from the emergency room. America the free, home of the brave, the greatest power in the world, and I might lose my hand because no one had the authority to give me an antibiotic. I was helplessly caught in a web of helplessness. What is happening to us? My hand has all but healed now. Fortunately. But this pit in the bottom of my stomach won’t go away. Something is wrong. Something is very, very wrong.
It is not that we don’t care, we are scared to care, and either convinced we can’t act or scared of the consequences if we do. We are the paraplegic who sees the knife cutting into his skin but can’t do anything about it. Our brain screams out, “this is wrong, this is wrong,” but our bodies are immobilized, helpless. So how do we handle it? We rewire, just like the paraplegic. We cut off the feeling as well, or at least we try. We drive our suburban to a job most of us don’t like, doing things most of us don’t believe make a difference. We come back to our homes, turn down our blinds, turn up our TVs, and tune out our world. We cut off. We try not to feel. We empathize with the characters on TV because they are safe, but not with people dying the world over. That’s just too close to home. What can we do anyway? Send a few dollars, appease our conscious. Maybe run a fundraiser.
We can rally financial for a tidal wave but not get out and vote for a political candidate. Why? Because we are convinced money can fix problems but we can’t, we don’t have the authority, we don’t have the power, we can’t fight. As a society we actually disdain those who do fight – activists are looked down upon as being a little off their rocker, extremists with a cause. Necessarily non-materialistic, we see them mostly as idealistic fools. And mostly they are. Not because of what they believe in but because we can’t believe in them.
It’s not that we don’t care. It is because we care. We care so much the only way to survive the fear and the helplessness is to hide. We convince ourselves that as long as our home is there to come home to, our family, our things then everything must be okay. We bury in a pursuit of materialism, of evidence that all is fine. As long as the internet is working the world must be just fine. Sure there’s this gnawing pit in the bottom of our stomach that so many things just aren’t okay, but there’s nothing we can do anyway, so let’s just push that aside and focus on our job, our garden, our to do list. Whatever you do, don’t look in the mirror where this scared, sad, helpless person is looking back at you asking, “Don’t you care?”
For me, I want the face in my mirror to reflect the smiling eyes of my angel from the road. I never had to ask if he cared. He stopped his world to change mine.
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