Dealing with Change
I recently had a friend relate on social media an experience she had in line at a gas station involving a young, confused, she even described him as rude, individual who wandered in, took a place in line in front of others who had been waiting and whose bag of loose change split open, dumping its contents across the floor. My friend took a few moments to help the interloper collect the coins under the stares and glares of the other denizens of the line. She held her tongue until reaching the store clerk and commented upon the lack of compassion of the others in line, prompting the clerk’s response that “everybody is rude and they’re thinking if they dropped their money, he wouldn’t help them.” This got me thinking.
Where are we, as a people, the citizenry of this country and members of the human race, when we can’t even take a second to stoop down and help someone pick up dropped items? And perish the thought of helping someone whom we deem to have wronged us or is beneath us. I’m not saying that this is so for each and every person who resides on the planet, as evidenced by my friend and her small but magnanimous act, as well as the generous contributions of others in the plethora of GoFundMe campaigns cropping up to cover people’s medical needs and people helping refugees from war-torn areas, among many, many others. But the growing lack of caring and empathy, however, is concerning.
For any of you who know me or read other things I’ve written or ranted about, you know my feelings on neoliberalism and its prevailing ideology of toxic individualism that seeps from it like so much rancid sludge. At the heart of neoliberalism is the belief that the measure of all things is economic—how it figures into the balance sheets of business or society or the self. In other words, the only thing that matters is if something, anything, everything, brings value. All acts become transactional in nature with the arbiter of their worth to be determined by each of us. How does “X” benefit me? It is this neoliberal philosophy that has infected each of us to varying degrees as well as society at-large.
Using the example shared by my friend above and so poignantly summed up by the clerk, no one, save my friend, moved to assist the coin-dropper because they saw no worth in such an action. Obviously, I’m not in the head of each person present and don’t know their exact thoughts regarding their inaction, but it is very clear from the relating of the sequence of events, the witnesses didn’t move to alleviate the plight of their fellow patron. I see this again and again in the most innocuous situations all the way up to international travesties. There is a pervasive and malignant feeling of detachment in regards to the conditions of those around us, both near and far. I'm embarrassed to say that I've far too often failed to act to help my neighbors when a few moments, a helping hand, a kind word or smile, could have made a big difference.
Is this a new phenomenon ushered in by the Trump Administration? As much as many of our burgeoning social ills can be traced to the anointing and rise of Mr. Trump, this can’t be directly attributable to him. What I have observed, however, is that paralleling the ascendancy of Mr. Trump has been the unapologetic acceptance of this hyper-individualism coupled with an unhealthy dose of “othering.” It is much easier to discount the needs and the humanity of others when they are demeaned, reduced to things that bring no value to one’s country, one’s society, one’s life. We merely have to check the headlines to see example after example after example ad nauseum illustrating this premise: insinuating that migrants from south of the border are “animals”, selling weapons to Saudi Arabia that are used to slaughter civilians in Yemen, numerous school shootings, young black men gunned down by each other and the police, describing certain places in our world as ‘shithole’ countries, Roseanne Barr’s attacking Tweets, the system of minority mass incarceration, the nixing of environmental protections--the depressing list fills the nightly news broadcasts, our social media feeds, our conversations.
This is our world. We will continue to careen down this path until we realize that we must reach out and grasp with two hands our fleeing humanity and reclaim it and embrace it. Until we open our eyes to the world around us and rediscover our common purpose and eschew our reverence of solipsism and the boot-strap myth, until we realize the inherent worth of each person trying to make her or his way, day to day, on this madly spinning globe, then we will be doomed to bending the arc of the moral universe back towards injustice. Start small. Open doors. Reject the status quo. Help with change.
