Through a Glass Lung, Darkly: A Call For Radical Empathy
I’ve taken to calling the disease “Glass Lung” to make it more effecting — it causes the appearance of ground glass occlusions early on. To avoid showing this directly, here’s a picture of broken safety glass.
I’ll be honest: everyone’s writing about the current public health crisis and no one wants to read about it. I managed to mainly focus on a game I thought was well-designed for the last piece, but as reopening looms closer in Missouri (and as I see Los Angeles extend their Shelter In Place order for another three months, because one of my favorite news podcasts is LA based,) I can’t help but also see a parade of other awful things: a security guard at target was assaulted and had his arm broken for insisting that people wear masks; another security guard, this one at a family dollar, shot and murdered for insisting the same. It seems to me that assaults – and murders – of black and brown Americans are also ticking upward.
As these states reopen, there going to be a definite jump in the numbers of cases – the death toll is climbing, and it’s disproportionately hitting in places that are insisting on allowing businesses to open again.
It seems like the one person who is trying to do something is Rashida Tlaib, using tools developed by Modern Monetary Theory.
I was informed yesterday that the retail job I work – which has been on the ropes for a while, now – is also reopening on Saturday. I’m happy that I’ll be getting a paycheck, but I’m worried that it looks like I’ll be working with the general public. It’s not like I have a choice, though: our government refuses to pass any kind of protection for working people or offer any kind of financial assistance to normal people in the midst of this public health crisis.
This is leading me back to a line of thinking that has occurred to me over and over again: there is this brain bug, among those people insulated by wealth and other forms of class privilege, that service workers are, in some way, not full people. We’re categorized in their minds as children, or as students, or as congenital fuck-ups not worth consideration in the calculus of how to run a society. Ultimately we are categorized as acceptable casualties.
And yet, during this period of isolation, it’s the hourly workers – many of them minimum wage – who were essential, who were required to risk infection so that the lights stay on.
This is a fault that exists on both sides of the truncated American political spectrum, which ranges anywhere from far right to center right as far as the rest of the world is concerned. I mean, sure, Republicans are threatening to shoot people trying to enforce safety regulations, but Democrats are looking at the infection numbers out of Georgia and smirking: so many fewer red-state voters, not thinking that many of those people are on the front line and suffering as a result of that.
I don’t trust most Middle Class tastes in aesthetics — after all, someone keeps providing subjects for McMansion Hell.
Here’s the thing: it seems to me that American politics is largely an exercise in tribalism and aesthetics for the middle class. Working people, limited as they are in what they can achieve, might often be apolitical, but my own experience tells me that most of them are interested in at least voting for their wages to go up and have a sick day every now and then. For the upper class, it often seems like a hobby – I don’t think a billionaire would really notice a five percent reduction in income. It’s like being the captain of an intramural team: viewed as personally meaningful, but low stakes most of the time.
So from working to upper class: survival, aesthetics, and pastime.
Part of the nature of this current situation is its monstrosity, in the original sense of a bad omen or a reminder: it unveils the truth that it has been about survival this whole time.
In their calls to go back to normal, the middle and upper class are screaming for the monster to be taken away, for it to get stuffed back into the basement where the working people alone have to deal with it.
I hope it never goes back to normal. I hope that people survive. I hope that people don’t have to live in fear of a horrible invisible enemy. I hope that we can see each other in person again and draw comfort from our friends and family. But I hope it never goes back to normal.
Because, as so many have noted, normal wasn’t working.
Hey, remember when back in the 90s we agreed that nostalgia for the 80s was stupid to the point where the mascot for it was Jim Breuer dressed up as a goat man?
We are nostalgic for the world we lived in back in 2015. We are nostalgic for the world we lived in back in 2019. We are nostalgic for the world we lived in back in February. But as our longest running media analysis series tells us with the title, nostalgia is a trap. It’s the desire to go back to sleep and ignore the world in front of us. To simplify the world into something digestible to a child.
The first step, in my mind, is to give working people their due. All the hedge fund managers and private equity ghouls are sheltering at home; the world can survive without them. It can’t survive without the people working the supply chain. It can’t survive without nurses. It can’t survive without working people.
The monstrosity of the current moment shows us this. It makes it obvious that only an idiot would deny the labor theory of value.
Okay, you know what, scratch that. It needs to be done, but it might be the second step. The first step, however, might be the fastest thing you have ever done, or it may be the hardest thing that you’ve ever tried: the first step is to develop a radical capacity for empathy.
One caveat: I’m not talking about empathy solely as viscerally (or performatively) feeling what other people are feeling – down that road lies people standing outside their homes to clap for people who want PPE – I’m talking about empathy as a practice. Empathy as taking the time to sort everyone into the mental bin of “person” instead of the bin of “service provider.” As someone to whom you have a duty. This isn’t about a quality that is possessed, it’s an act. A becoming. We need a Practice of Becoming-Empathetic.
Because unless you can look at everyone – not everyone you encounter, not everyone you see, but every single person – as a complete human being as worthy of respect and understanding as you are, then you’re not fit to go back in public.
GK Chesterton, British author and possibly the one right-wing intellectual I have respect for, once said that “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” — which can be read as an exhortation to use imagination to solve problems. We have problems, we need imagination.
This, more than any other social effect, seems to be the real problem of the current moment. We’re isolating ourselves and all of the news is bad. It’s easier to shut down and not face the monster. It’s tempting to try to go back to sleep: sleep is comforting; you don’t have to deal with the utter bullshit rising knee-deep all around you.
But when you do that, you’re leaving the work for everyone else.
Think of it this way: think back to the earliest job you had, the really terrible one where you had to clean up at the end of the day. And if you never had a job in school and jumped into a well-paying job right afterward, send me twenty dollars and imagine you’ve ever had a real job.
It’s closing time for the world we knew. It’s time to sweep and mop. Time to wash the dishes and put them back. Time to wipe down the counters and count the register – and panic because there’s a roll of quarters in there that you missed and the count’s off and you’ve got to do it again.
Everyone hates the guy who gets done first and tries to dip early. Everyone loves – or at least respects – they guy who does more than their fair share, taking on more once they’re done with their part of the job.
Don’t be the first guy. Be the second guy.
We’re all in this together, and the only real choice we have it to cooperate, and that gets a lot easier when you acknowledge that the people around you are, in fact, people.
Which is not achieved by assaulting security guards or haranguing nurses out of a van window or being Boris Johnson – the politician so antithetical to the public good that his lungs couldn’t even kill him for the sake of the British people(1)– but instead is achieved by moving carefully and giving thought to how to best protect other people.
Oh, and wearing a mask. That’s key.
And when the crisis is over, we need to get around to building a new world, because we desperately need a new one. For almost all of my post-college life, we’ve lived inside the shambling corpse of a world that should have died twelve years ago. The necromancy that’s kept it shuffling forward has run out, and once the economy craters again, they’re going to change the batteries, and leave us with an economy that’s worse than the one we just left.
It’s going to happen that way unless we do something. It’s going to keep happening that way unless we do something. And if we don’t take some kind of act, the looters who are responsible for this situation are going to keep lining their pockets.
If there’s one thing that the monster – call it Covid-19, call it Coronavirus, whatever, I’m going to call it by my preferred shorthand “glass lung” – has done that we can call less-than-malignant it’s revealing the bones under the corpse’s flesh, not only the places where they lever and flex against each other, but also the faults and points of strain and weaknesses that we never noticed before.
We need but use the weapons of the one monster to fight the other.
1. I realize that this isn’t exactly an example of radical empathy as I’ve painted it, and I acknowledge that failure on my own part. I don’t want to go back on what I said, and I don’t want anyone to die from the virus, but I also feel a great deal of anger at the leadership of the United Kingdom, the United States, and a number of other nations – it’s hard not to feel a spot of schadenfreude. I’m going to voice it, acknowledge it isn’t in line with what I’ve said, apologize, and move on. But I’m still going to say it. Because Christ.
※
If you enjoyed reading this, consider following our writing staff on Twitter, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. Just in case you didn’t know, we also have a Facebook fan page, which you can follow if you’d like regular updates and a bookshop where you can buy the books we review and reference (while supporting both us and a coalition of local bookshops all over the United States.)