It's time to bridge the empathy gap.
There’s a phrase that I keep seeing throughout the pandemic. I’ve seen it detailed in balloons on Twitter and Instagram and misattributed to Dr. Anthony Fauci. It’s a simple, exasperated plea: “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.” |
The phrase is the headline of a 2017 HuffPost column by Kayla Chadwick in which she laments what she calls “a fundamental divide on what it means to live in a society.” |
Her words keep echoing through my head as I read our coverage of the debate over what to do about opening schools this fall. My colleague Michelle Goldberg has written urgently and vitally on the topic, arguing that remote schooling is an absolute nightmare that isn’t being addressed by government officials: “Airlines got a bailout. Parents are on their own,” she wrote. |
‘On their own’ has multiple meanings. Quite literally, parents will be left with the difficult task of home schooling their children via distance learning should schools stay closed. But it also applies to a lack of empathy. There is no national support group for parents forced into captivity with their children to weather a series of overlapping crises including but not limited to: an out-of-control pandemic, mass unemployment and national social unrest. Parents are at their wit’s end. There’s a feeling this can’t possibly go on. The message from Washington? More culture warring, few good solutions. |
Meanwhile, teachers are just as lost. Most are desperate to return to their jobs but equally afraid. “I am prepared to take a bullet to save a child,” Rebecca Martinson, a teacher, wrote in an Op-Ed this weekend. But asking her to return to the classroom during a pandemic, she wrote, is “like asking me to take that bullet home to my own family.” |
Our columnist, Farhad Manjoo, felt similarly. “It doesn’t strike me as fair to demand that teachers now risk their lives, too, just because our government couldn’t be bothered to protect them.” |
On Twitter (where good faith debate goes to die) I’ve been demoralized by a few prominent responses to Rebecca’s Op-Ed suggesting she quit her job if she’s not willing to die for it. The lack of empathy doesn’t end there. From mask compliance to government assistance, Americans seem blinded by a focus on personal freedom over collective good. Case in point: Gov. Mike Parson of Missouri’s recent comments that children will go to school, will get Covid-19 and will deal with it. “They’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it,” he said. |
So frequently, we forget that our debates about politics and policy are about real people. On Saturday, the Times Editorial Board offered a poignant reminder of that, profiling Autumn Lee, a pre-med junior at the University of New Mexico, who has been forced to drive 45 minutes to a McDonald’s parking lot to siphon off enough Wi-Fi to get her schoolwork done. She’s one of the 21 million or more Americans on the wrong side of the digital divide, without access to broadband. |
There aren’t easy answers about the school debate — a Times Op-Ed published yesterday lays out one proposal to keep schools open, but still relies on many families keeping their kids at home. But our only hope to resolve these issues is to remember that they don’t exist inside a vacuum, nor are they solely our own problems. To get through this pandemic we have to bridge the empathy gap. We know the coming months will be deeply trying, but they could be disastrous if we don’t find a way to start caring about other people. |
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