Last week, I wrote a message for graduates. This week, I want to say a few things to those of us who graduated long ago and it might be painful.
Let’s start this week with the dark cesspool where genuine thought and humanity ends — the comment section, because that’s where we lost the soul of America, and I think we ought to at least acknowledge the crime scene before we move on.
You know the comment section. You’ve been there. Some of you live there. It is a place where real human beings — people with mothers, with children, with a favorite breakfast order and a song that makes them cry in the car — read a story about another real human being suffering, and type something like “play stupid games, win stupid prizes” before going back to their lunch.
It takes about four seconds. It requires no thought. It costs nothing. And it is, I would argue, one of the most spiritually corrosive habits a person can develop — right up there with Reddit threads where Americas cruelest sociopaths never run out of insulting things to say or downvotes to give — and that’s not even mentioning the moderators who seem to get paid per use of the ban hammer.
We have built an entire infrastructure for callousness. A showroom for our growing lack of decency and civility.
If those words are foreign concepts to you, you might want to stop reading now, because this column is, in fact, an attack on your deeply held albiet bizarre lifestyle.
Yes, this week I am lamenting our lack of principles and character again, and yes, I know I wrote a book about it already. But here is what I want to ask you today, and I want you to sit with it before you answer: when did the news you encounter stop breaking your heart?
Not making you angry. Not making you reach for your phone to fire off a hot take. Not making you nod along because it confirmed something you already believed. When did it stop breaking your heart?
Because some of the stories we have been covering lately have been stories that should stop a person cold. Stories that should make you put down your coffee and say, quietly, to nobody in particular, “That’s not right. That’s not okay. That’s a person. A human being”
And instead, I keep seeing laughing emojis.
Let’s start in Georgia, because that’s where we live, and charity begins at home.
Right now, Georgians are dropping their health insurance. Not because they decided they didn’t need it. Not because they’re young and invincible and made a calculated risk. They’re dropping it because they cannot afford it anymore. The premiums went up. The coverage went down drastically. The medicine they need costs more than their car payment, and something had to give.
Your neighbors are rationing insulin. Your friends are skipping the cardiologist because the copay is the same as a week’s worth of groceries. Your fellow Georgians are being forced to make decisions that no person in a country this wealthy should ever have to make, and they are making them quietly, at kitchen tables, in the dark, hoping they can hold on a little longer.
And instead of compassion, many of you beat your chests and proclaim loudly that if they didn’t own an iPhone or if they just ate less avocado toast, they could magically afford medication that is thousands of dollars per month. Afterall, your health care doesn’t cost much.
But you’re not sick. You go to the doctor once a year for a physical. You don’t have a heart problem. You don’t deal with a chronic illness. You haven’t gotten a diagnosis that changed your life in three minutes.
You haven’t walked a mile in those shoes — and honestly, based on everything above, you’d probably twist an ankle in the driveway.
This is not a political position. I am not asking you to vote a particular way. I am asking you to feel something. I am asking you to look at your neighbor — your actual neighbor, the one who waves at you from the driveway — and consider that she might be one diagnosis away from financial ruin, and that this should make you angry on her behalf. Not at a party. Not at a talking head. Angry at a system that has decided that the health of human beings is a revenue stream, and that the people running that system have more money than they will ever spend in several lifetimes while your neighbor rations her blood pressure medication.
That should break your heart. If it doesn’t, I’d like to gently suggest that your heart is more diseased than anyone currently struggling to pay their cardiologist bills.
There is a man — and I want you to think of him as a man, not as a category, not as a symbol, not as a political point — who lost his limbs while in the custody of a Georgia prison.
He was incarcerated. I know what some of you are already thinking, and I am asking you, with great affection and some firmness, to stop thinking it for just a moment.
Because here is the thing about “if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime”: it is not a medical policy. It is not a standard of care. It is not a justification for a human being losing his hands and feet because the people responsible for his wellbeing decided his wellbeing wasn’t worth the time or the paperwork.
The punishment for his crime — whatever it was — was incarceration. Not amputation. Not neglect so severe it costs a man his limbs. That is not justice. That is not toughness. That is not what any serious person, on any side of any debate about criminal justice, actually believes should happen to a human being in the custody of the state. Sure it is justice to the comments section, but those jaw-heads don’t understand the concept. They equate justice to punishment — the harsher the better.
If that story didn’t make you wince — if your first instinct was to reach for a bumper sticker slogan instead of a shred of basic human sympathy — I want you to ask yourself when exactly you decided that some people are too far gone to deserve the minimum. Because that is a dangerous place to live, and it is a very short road from there to somewhere no decent human being should want to go.
There is a virus on a cruise ship. People have died.
I know. I know what’s coming. I can already hear the keyboards warming up. “Here we go again.” “They’re at it again.” “Wake up, sheeple.” And my personal favorite genre: the laughing emoji left on a news story about a person who died.
Let me be very plain about this.
When you put a laughing emoji on a story about someone dying from a disease, you are laughing at a funeral. You are standing in the back of the church during the eulogy and cackling. You are walking past the grave of someone you don’t know, and spitting on it. And you are doing it because you have decided that your political stance — your suspicion, your contrarianism, your team loyalty — is more important than the basic human acknowledgment that a person died and left behind people who loved them.
Is this virus COVID? Probably not. Is it as serious? Probably not. Does that matter to the families of the people who died from it? It does not. They are grieving. They are sitting in the same stunned silence that every family sits in when someone they love is suddenly gone, and somewhere out there, a stranger with a WiFi connection is adding a laughing face in response to the news of their loss.
People died during COVID, too. Real people. People with names and families and favorite songs and a chair at a table that is now empty. And I understand that the pandemic was politicized in ways that were maddening and exhausting and sometimes genuinely dishonest. I understand the fatigue. I covered the pandemic. I didn’t have a choice to stick my head in the sand or turn off the news. I can assure you that my fatigue with it runs far deeper than yours — and yet I never once stopped seeing the people who died as less than human.
The people who died were not political points. They were people. And if we have gotten so deep into our bunkers that we can no longer look at a death toll and feel something — anything — then we have traded our humanity for a team jersey, and I am not sure we got a fair deal.
Here’s a number to wrestle with: 1.2 million Americans died from COVID. That’s roughly the entire population of New Hampshire — one whole state, just gone. You can debate the politics, the mandates, the masking, the messaging, all of it. Reasonable people did and still do. But somewhere in the middle of all that important debating, it might be good to pause to acknowledge that an awful lot of people died and left behind people who loved them.
When we laugh, minimize, or reach for a conspiracy to make it all feel less real, we’re not owning some brave contrarian truth — we’re just coping. And that’s fine, coping is human. Just realize that is what your mind is actually doing. What you shouldn’t do is run down other people because you are having trouble coping with a very real life-changing moment in our shared history.
And then there are the traffic stops — another place where our collective numbness shows up, and where the cost of that numbness is measured in lives.
I want to say something plainly, because I think it sometimes gets lost in the noise: a traffic stop should not be a death sentence. That is not a political statement. It is not an attack on law enforcement. It is a standard that anyone who believes in ordered liberty and the rule of law should be able to affirm without hesitation.
If you have never watched coverage of a police shooting and thought, even for a moment, “that could be my child” — if that thought has never crossed your mind, not once — I want to ask you why. I want to ask you what it is that makes that particular leap of imagination impossible for you. Because that is the leap that connects us to each other. That is the thing that makes us a community instead of just a collection of people who happen to live near each other.
Use of force is a serious thing. It should always be treated as a serious thing. Even when it is necessary — and sometimes it is — it should never be casual. It should never be reflexive. And it should never be something we shrug at because the person on the ground wasn’t someone we identified with.
That is not a political position. That is just being a person.
There is an old familiar story about a man who got beaten up on the side of the road.
He was robbed. He was left for dead. And the people who passed him — the respectable people, the religious people, the people who had their theology in order and their opinions about who deserved help and who didn’t — they crossed to the other side of the road. They had places to be. They had positions to maintain. They had, I imagine, very strong feelings about personal responsibility.
And then a Samaritan came along. The wrong kind of person, by the standards of the day. The kind of person the beaten man probably would have crossed the street to avoid under better circumstances. And he stopped. He helped. He paid for the man’s care out of his own pocket and didn’t ask for anything in return.
Jesus told that story and then asked, “Which of these was a neighbor to the man who was beaten?”
I think about that story a lot lately. I think about it when I read about Georgians who can’t afford their insulin. I think about it when I read about a man who lost his limbs in a prison cell. I think about it when I see a laughing emoji on a death notice. I think about it when another traffic stop ends in a funeral.
We have forgotten the story. Or maybe we remember it fine and have just decided it doesn’t apply to the people we’ve put in the category of “them.”
The Samaritan didn’t ask what the beaten man had done to deserve his situation. He didn’t check his politics. He didn’t scroll through his history to see if he was worth the trouble. He just saw a person in a ditch and decided that was enough information.
I am not asking you to agree with me about policy. I am not asking you to change your vote or your party or your deeply held convictions about how the world ought to work.
I am asking you something much simpler — and honestly, something most of us try to avoid.
I am asking you to feel something.
I am asking you to read a story about a person suffering and let it land somewhere before you react. I am asking you to look at the news — the real news, the human news, the stories about people who are sick and scared and losing things they cannot get back — and sit with it. Let it remind you that you are also a person. That you are also, on your best days and your worst ones, someone who needs a neighbor.
The politics of the moment are loud. The ragebait is relentless. The algorithm is specifically designed to make you feel like the person across from you is your enemy, because angry people feed Facebook’s algorithm and fund its data sucking operations.
But you are not an algorithm. You are a person. You were made for something better than a laughing emoji on a stranger’s obituary.
I believe we can be better, and you should, too.