Discomfort rises as empathy seems scarce
We can't let ourselves grow indifferent to outrages and offenses
Roscoe rests his paws after a romp in the snow. He’s more durable than we are, it seems. (RS photo)
It is dark these days when my pup and I head out for our morning inspection of the road that winds through the nearby woods, and just now it’s pretty cold — a couple of degrees below zero at dawn today, in fact. Our bighearted Roscoe bounds about, mindless to the chill, his paws protected by what veterinary science labels rete mirabile, literally, “wondrous net” — a complex web of arteries and veins that prevents heat loss by warming the blood returning from Roscoe’s cold paw surface before it goes to his heart. In other species, the same sort of web protects brains from over-heating, a clear advantage on a warming planet.1
Dogs and other animals developed this protection evolutionarily, so they don’t feel the pain we would if, say, our bare feet touched the snowy Upstate surface. Lucky dogs. It makes you wonder how the evolutionary process might still be playing out. You know: What will pain or please the creatures prowling these parts millennia from now?
We ought to worry, even aside from wondering how our species will adapt to climate change. Genetic drift is a slow process, but cultural evolution isn’t, really. And that’s where we’re facing trouble. Plenty of evidence suggests that Americans are becoming more cold-blooded — emotionally, that is, not biologically. We are less inclined to access the empathy that has long been considered a fundamental and valuable human trait, and at the same time we are less willing to summon our evolved capacity for discernment, which enables us to make sound judgments based on distinguishing what’s good from what’s bad.
Some people seem to think this is just fine. Elon Musk, currently the wealthiest human and a key underwriter of President Trump’s political success, declared earlier this year, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” (Musk and Trump have repaired their friendship, by the way, if that had worried you.) Criticism of empathy is a growing refrain among leaders of evangelical Christianity, the core Trump constituency, with some influential preachers agreeing with Musk that seeing the world through others’ eyes is a vice.2
Meanwhile, Americans seem to have rapidly succumbed to a level of apathy about events and behavior that so recently would have shocked us. Partly this is because the sheer volume of outrages has numbed us to their daily appearance: American missiles blowing helpless shipwreck survivors out of the water; food pantry shelves bare as bagged chips are substituted for meat at financially-stressed distribution points; billions of dollars stripped from the healthcare system and scientific research, even as the government’s top scientists flee a bureaucracy now led by a science skeptic; the Justice Department corrupted into a partisan tool of a felonious president’s revenge campaign; environmental protections developed over decades trashed to make way for polluters’ profits, at the expense of making the nation’s air and water dirtier and the world’s climate more fragile.
Any one of those distressing developments, and so many more, would have just a decade ago prompted bipartisan outrage and grassroots activism. Now we are nearly inured to the injury. It’s not that we’ve given up entirely: There’s growing opposition to Trumpism across the country, and many people of conscience are organizing, lobbying and campaigning to change the status quo.3
But the response isn’t commensurate to the offense. We’re simply experiencing too much chaos to deal appropriately with any piece of it. And a political system that you might imagine would be rising up in indignation is stuck in partisan paralysis. Suddenly, we don’t see our society evolving in the right direction.
Over three decades leading newsrooms, I designed perhaps 10,000 newspaper front pages. This experience gave me a reaction most folks might not have when I hear the complaint that’s rather common nowadays when we notice some dreadful news: “That oughta be on the front page every day,” people say.
Yep. Typically, it oughta. But there aren’t front pages big enough — or web designs broad enough — to adequately depict everything that we ought to consider huge news these days. Most people now get news from digital feeds that respond to algorithms as much as to human decision-making, but even so, there’s always another big story pushing aside something that was the last hour’s most important new development. We can’t keep up.
Take, for example, this week’s release of an update to the United States’ national security strategy, which lays out the Trump administration’s broad approach to world affairs. Did you hear about it? In 33 pages, it is a repudiation of America’s post-World War II role as an advocate for human rights and peaceful relations, essentially embracing Vladimir Putin’s vision of a world run by competing military powers with their own spheres of influence. It offers encouragement to right-wing nationalist politicians in European nations and warns Europe of “civilizational erasure,” echoing the language of the Great Replacement Theory, the far-right claim that Western governments are intentionally trying to replace white people with nonwhite immigrants.4
In another time, a document that so radically redefines America’s foreign policy objectives would be astonishing and would, indeed, find a place on the contemporary equivalent of a front page. But the report of its release appeared on the 7th page of The New York Times website and on the 8th page of washingtonpost.com, below such news stories as the Supreme Court taking up Trump’s challenge to the Constitution’s grant of birthright citizenship and the latest steps in the sweeping revision to childhood vaccine policy that is being carelessly established by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — the latter a legacy of the convergence during last year’s campaign of two men’s outsized egos and mental illnesses.
Worthy “front-page stories” all, certainly. But they will be displaced tomorrow, and that day’s big story will yield on the tomorrow that follows, as a nation now accustomed to shocking news moves along quickly to something else. No wonder far fewer Americans are following the news now than when Trump first sought the White House, according to a new Pew Research study: We’re simply worn out, so rather than struggling to keep up, we tune out.5
But the glut of troubling news is creating an empathy gap that is only exacerbated by an inattentive Congress. That was underscored by another big story that was also drawing attention on the day Trump’s new security policy was released: a report that the video of two shirtless survivors of a U.S. strike on a boat in the Caribbean Sea showed them waving to something overhead, and struggling to hold onto fragments of their boat, just before a second U.S. missile struck and obliterated them. While some observers say the Trump administration’s attacks on more than 20 vessels in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean amount to war crimes, with 87 victims to date, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, called the attack on the boat survivors “righteous,” and “exactly what we’d expect our military commanders to do.”6
Yes, that’s news. As to whether sinking the frantic victims was “righteous,” we might offer unsolicited counsel to Cotton, who has described himself as a devout Christian and a “lifelong member” of the First Methodist Church of Dardanelle, Ark. – namely, the senator might weigh the exhortation in one of the earliest epistles in the New Testament, that “a harvest of righteousness is grown from the seed of peace planted by peacemakers.”7
So we may rightly ask: Why wouldn’t any political figure in a position of responsibility be shocked by what may have been murder by American forces? Why aren’t we hearing more about the dangerous cold shoulder Trump is turning toward our European allies as he echoes Putin? And, incidentally, why aren’t we all outraged by Trump administration cuts to food programs, with more coming next year, even as a record number of people are turning to food banks for help with rising grocery bills?
The answers are partly found in our own daily lives: We are busy, distracted, tired — worn out, perhaps, by the relentlessness of outrages from Washington, so many of which haven’t even made the cut for this column. And too many politicians are choosing partisan fealty over patriotic responsibility, with their supporters’ acquiescence.
We can’t allow this to become acceptable. It needs to be called out both in ourselves and among elected officials.
Rather than repudiating empathy, as some of our leaders suggest, we need to embrace it; instead of tolerating immoral apathy among ordinary citizens and political leaders alike, we need to assert the standards that have long defined human decency.
That will require tireless effort, especially in the 11 months before our next federal elections, even if it makes us uncomfortable or leaves us exhausted. We have to demand of ourselves both the mental effort needed to stay engaged and, if we can, the physical effort that will bring success to the candidates and causes that might restore the values that ought to be ours.
A quite uncomfortable year surely lies ahead, with more shocks to our sense of morality. But we need to handle the discomfort as we embrace rather than insulate ourselves from this reality. We owe no less to the generations to come. That is, there can be no adaptation to this reality, no rete mirabile for us: With the chill in the air and the heat at our back, we might better respond with the depth of feeling that this range of challenges and outrages demands.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/veterinary-science-and-veterinary-medicine/rete-mirabile
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/polls/donald-trump-approval-rating-polls.html
In fact, an average of nationwide polls probably exaggerates Trump’s popularity, because some of the polls counted aren’t entirely credible, based on their partisan bias. It’s right to assume that fewer than four in 10 Americans think Trump is doing a good job as president, and his rating on handling the economy — usually the voting issue for most Americans — is even lower.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/12/05/trump-europe-russia-national-security-strategy/
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/12/03/americans-are-following-the-news-less-closely-than-they-used-to/
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/12/05/us/trump-news
The Epistle of James, one the 21 letters in the New Testament, was said by early church leaders to have been written by Jesus’ half-brother (a notion not supported by contemporary scholarship). It exhorts Christians to live their faith, emphasizing that what you do is a reflection of what you believe.
The famous Roscoe Paw Pile: resilient and adorable, right? (RS photo)
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“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.” - James Baldwin
It’s not getting better…far from it. We need to remember it’s them, not us. And still far, far too many of them.