A crisis of empathy

The single thing that frightens me most about the state of America is this.  We are in a crisis of empathy.

No matter what the crisis, no matter whose life has been taken, or changed irrevocably, no matter how brutal the carnage, too many Americans just don't care enough to give something up to help make it better.

I don't know what happened to the nation that used ration coupons and collected scrap metal and grease and rubber.  To the women that drew lines on the back of their legs because their were no stockings.  To the families that all had someone at risk to defeat the Axis forces.

Now, we live in a nation that reveres guns and ammunition.  No number of children, or nurses, or doctors, or teachers, or grandmothers, or anyone dead from the gun violence epidemic in America will make them consider a change that might impact them and their 'rights'.

This is great news for the people who can't put their cell phones down.  The gun deaths of people less than twenty outnumber the motor vehicles deaths for the first time in recorded history, so the motor vehicle deaths caused by cell phone use and distracted driving don't matter either.

I will never understand how any tragedy can be trivialized to the point that a person doesn't care. I cry and cry.  I become paralyzed with grief with the news of the horrific deaths and disabilities caused daily by violence and negligence.

In my books, empathy is a guiding emotion.  My characters feel terrible when anyone suffers, and do their best to relieve whatever suffering they can.  And when someone suffers, everyone prays and tries to help.

I believe one of the purposes of fiction is to allow us to meet people we can never know, and to see a world different from the one we live in.  My solemn hope is that by meeting people in fiction that you would never meet in person, all of us become more tolerant and accepting of the stranger, believing that we share more with our neighbors than just the air we breathe.

The other hope is that fiction inspires us to become more than we are.  More like a character that we admire in a work of fiction.  More loving, more forgiving, more merciful.

I have been taking great solace in my writing in these turbulent times.  I keep praying that somehow I will be able to make a difference.  Help someone learn empathy.  Help someone appreciate sacrifice for the greater good.  Help someone cope with the ugliness around us by showing them a beautiful loving community.

And I pray that empathy and sacrifice will become core values that everyone embraces for the good of each other.  I don't know any other way to navigate through this darkness.