Charlottesville

On Saturday violence erupted on the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia escalating in vehicular homicide wherein a car was driven through a crowd of people. That's probably the most bloodless, tame way I could describe what occurred a few days ago, but this is an opinion-based blog, so it's probably time to put that aside.

Would highly recommend watching this New York Times video giving a simple breakdown in the events that occurred in Charlottesville. Violence in Charlottesville was likely inevitable on some scale. Neo-Nazis tend to stir up strong feelings, surprisingly. However, there were at least two groups who were anathema to one another. The first was a demonstration and march by White supremacists and neo-Nazis who gathered in park and intended to march through the city to Emancipation Park. A group of counter-protestors gathered at nearby park and intended to countermarch to disrupt their gathering.

While I think that it has been pretty disturbing all on its own, I don't particularly want to discuss the nature of response to these events. Though from what I've seen I am none-too-pleased by some of the media coverage. Some have seemed to find far too much comfort in the "their both to blame" narrative.

I think we have to take a moment now to reflect on how the hell we came to a point in 2017 where people are chanting racist, literal Nazi slogans, waving Nazi, Confederate and other right-wing flags in America. While I cannot substantiate the veracity of the tweets I saw a number of posts apparently from veterans (this is where it gets dubious) about having fought the Nazis and now their flags are waved by Americans claiming to be patriots. Something has gone deeply wrong here.

In a certain sense this is nothing new. In the far-right and white nationalist movements of the United States there has always been a blend of American patriotic and Nazi/German imagery. Right-wing militias, survivalists, Aryan Nation, and certain biker gangs have all formed a cohort of white supremacists. The Nazis are the go-to villains in much of American culture, yet we see with far greater public acknowledgement that there are those who view Hitler as one of the good guys.

It's a baffling about face, especially given the degree to which America's history in World War II made the country what it is today. Still, I don't expect twenty-first century racists and fascists to have a strong grasp of history.

White supremacy has always been tied to terrorism. This is a fact. If you don't believe me do a casual search for the history of the KKK and lynchings. There is a certain dark poetry that the vehicular murder of a protestor and the injury of nineteen others mirrors attacks by Islamic radicals in recent years.

I am going to try to keep my remarks balanced here. I do not believe we're seeing a mass movement of grassroots American Nazis. I do believe that in the last few years that far-right rhetoric has been normalized to a certain extent. A few years ago these people would be far more marginalized and few would be willing to publicly defend them. Parts of the far-right, the racist right, is now part of normal discourse. I don't put this on Donald Trump. This has been an element of American culture for decades, and normalized particularly in the wake of 2007 and during the Obama years and the Tea Party.

America in 2017 is not Weimar Germany. I hate that I have to say that so sincerely. What is socially acceptable, or reasonable within the public discourse though is increasingly embracing these people, and if it doesn't they create their own media to share their own twisted ideology. This problems is only likely to get worse. Racism, fascism and Nazism are inherently violent ideologies and we should sadly be braced for more incidents such as this. There is no part of that that isn't heartbreaking.

The Empathy Deficit

Empathy is an undervalued talent. Empathy is the ability to sympathize, understand and/or feel someone else’s emotional or mental state. It is fundamental to being able to interact with other people. In a way it is more important for interacting with complete strangers than people you are close with. In time you build an emotional bond with people you know, even casually, and are constrained by basic etiquette to be sensitive to their feelings.

I’m having a hard time expressing my key idea here, so I’m just going to go straight to the point. I am concerned that changes in culture and technology has eroded our sense of empathy and made us a colder, harsher society.

I work as a teacher at a private tutoring company. I often speak to my students about their lives at school. Lately my students have shared with me a stream of stories about violence in their schools that they have seen, or their friends have experienced. Despite the latest push against bullying it appears violence and intimidation is alive in well in the educational system. I was not particularly disturbed by my students’ accounts, but by their reaction to some of it. More than one admitted to acting as a by-stander. One in particular recounted the fight with glee and described how exciting it was.

I challenged each of my students on their position as bystanders, and their relationship to the violence around them. I don’t think my group of students are particularly sociopathic, but I do feel they are representative. I challenged their empathy; I asked them about the victims. None of them reported these assaults. One grade nine student said that he had a friend who called a teacher during a fight and the attackers beat him up the next week: “snitching” as it’s called. The culture of prisons is present in our school. This isn’t a new development of course. There were the same pressures while I was at high school, but my students are younger, in middle school or elementary school.

I may have led a sheltered life, perhaps more innocent and less violent than the average, but it seems to me that the culture is changing. Violence is more accepted and victims are dismissed, if they are thought about at all.

People are no longer fellow human beings to many; instead they are merely interactive objects, or static things. I have discussed this before but as we have become digitally connected we have cut the links for face-to-face interaction. We live inside our screens and behind our earphones; we consciously ignore those around us and would prefer if they did not exist. Riding on public transit very few ever talk to their neighbours, they are engrossed in their own little worlds.

It is not just a casual relationship with violence that made me concerned with our collective empathy. I have been considering our society’s relationships with gender and sexuality. I believe the lack of empathy has led to a greater push towards the objectification of both genders. My rationalization is that if we do not think about the person behind the body then they merely exist as an object. A friend and I were recently out to dinner at a large chain restaurant. I began a conversation with him about the shift in service staff in restaurants over the last few years. Around us were servers, all female, all under thirty, all wearing form-fitting clothing, all thin, and, at least in our opinion, all were pretty. This trend is more or less shamefully exploited by restaurants.

In our conversation we debated the merits and motivation of this move, and we tried to understand how the employees felt about it. We admitted we couldn’t be sure, but that to my mind it would feel degrading. A manager measuring my skirt to make sure it is short enough (not too short, short enough) would be offensive to me. I will not presume to speak for these young women. However, as a heterosexual man I found it degrading personally. The marketing mindset that says if sexually appealing women are presented to me I’m more likely to eat at the restaurant, buy more and tip higher disgusts me. They view me as an object that is motivated by base sexual desires. I, obviously, have only scratched the surface on gender issues in society, but this is something that has been on my mind for a long while.

Do we see people behind the strangers that we meet? They are are feeling and thinking people, not merely objects for our amusement or obstacles in our own lives.