Empathy is a Good Thing, Actually

what could bring our nation back from this madness

I was recently reading aloud to my 9-year-old son. The boy’s never met a picture book biography he doesn’t love, especially if it involves history. This particular story was a gift from his uncle, a history teacher, titled Revolutionary Friends: General George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette. It’s a fantastic picture book by Selene Castrovilla and for some reason, what jumped out to me was that Lafayette was so smitten with America that he returned to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

It’s wild to think of just how unique of a nation America was at the time. Our Declaration of Independence and Constitution have gone on to inspire many countries to craft their own lists of values, standards, and beliefs. And to have pride in the project that was America was so widespread. People, overall, liked being American. It’s why thousands of people attempted to come here; why those who weren’t given its benefits sought to make society more equitable; why America has contributed some of the greatest inventions of the world. Of course, there were wide swaths of people for whom the American Dream was not delivered¹, and that is the truth for literally every single nation in the history of the world. America is a project, not a perfected gift. But overall, it has been a good project.

These days, it is not popular to say you love America, or being American. (Hey Siri, play “I Hate it Here” by Taylor Swift.) It is important to let everyone know that our president is a fascist and a war criminal. To make sure all of the World Wide Web understands that you are on the right side of history, away from those losers with the American Flag t-shirts and Miller Lite.

Furthermore, you can barely scroll Substack without coming across an article that discusses “how to stay hopeful during trying times” or “how to find beauty in darkness”. These are good, worthy, important pieces, for the most part, but it’s curious to me how many of them are not talking about our individual sufferings but instead the world’s, as if COVID gave us all a virus we have yet to shake off. They seem to be implying that this is a uniquely horrible time in history. Nobody, they seem to assume, is doing very well, or at least, nobody with a caring heart.

I have no idea if that’s true. It requires a perspective that I, at 33 years old, do not possess. I know this: whether or not America has transformed into some sort of grotesque belch, the constant sharing of every single minute tragedy around the world, shoved in front of your eyeballs for six hours a day, is probably helping you feel that way. So maybe things are actually going relatively well (antibiotics! Very low poverty rates! Laws against child labor) or maybe they’re going relatively horribly (a quickly approaching world war! A president who could not care less about your rule of law! The rise of the manosphere!) but one thing I know for sure is that the solution to getting things back to a time when we were proud to be American doesn’t have to do with who’s in office—or at least, not nearly as much as we think it does.