You Want Some Salt with Those Wounds?: Thanks for Your Empathy, America

Your family is killed in a horrific, nationally important tragedy. You cry, you mourn, but you still can’t wrap your head around exactly what has happened. In fact, it all seems like a dream. You turn on the TV a week after the event and what’s on the news? Well, at first an old lady on the ground screaming about Life Alert and then a surprisingly good-looking man of ambiguous ethnic origin eating a Big Mac with his three children and hot-as-Mila-Kunis wife. But after all the light flashing and patty chewing, the news comes on and some big-haired, unaccented-voiced man with dimples the size of the Grand Canyon starts blathering on about gun control as a result of what you have experienced.

Is this really how you would want the nation to view the deaths of those closest to you? Would the first thought in your mind be magazine size or coffin size? The fact of the matter is that America is a good place, filled with good people, who themselves are filled with a loving empathy. The problem is that we let our emotions get the best of us. I was in Massachusetts for the entirety of the recent events in Boston. Many of my fellow students (drinkers/athletes/partiers/socialites/actors, whatever one calls people who attend institutions of “higher education” these days. I prefer to call myself a test-taker because it most accurately describes what I do) are from the Boston area. Despite this closeness to the situation (or maybe due to it), I saw some of the most wonderful, along with unfortunately despicable, reactions to this tragedy. I saw prayers for the perpetrators paralysis or death. I saw conspiracy theorists scrambling to find a way to blame Uncle Sam (or use the opportunity to draw attention to U.S. foreign policy, which although noble in intent, is untimely and insensitive). I even saw preliminary defenses of gun rights and preliminary calls to lock all the guns away and to hold hands under the magical rainbow of multicultural tolerance and love.

And I have never been more put off in my life. Rahm Emanuel is supposed to have said, “Never let a good crisis go to waste” (or something to that effect). Well I’m saying waste the crisis. Let people grieve and feel. Stop using periods of high emotion to promote your own agenda. I have my own agenda. Maybe I want to take all the guns, hoard them for myself in my racially-segregated, anti-Chechen fortress in Moscow and run a microstate where pot is legal and an unveiled woman is subject to being locked in my special jail called “the Big Freeze.” The fact of the matter is that I shouldn’t use a horrific tragedy in which people died to argue that said microstate should exist. That’s right; I said “people” died. You know, the building block of civilization, the thing you are. People deserve time to grieve and to overcome; they don’t deserve blatant manipulation.

We can talk about these issues. We just can’t talk about them right now. Is it so hard for the American public to wait a couple weeks, maybe even months, so that people can be sad? I know people are well-meaning and I don’t mean to indict the American public in such harsh terms, but I know we can do better. Maybe I’m an evil idealist who is so out of touch with reality that he thinks empathy is a worthwhile emotion, but let’s hold off on the political talk for a bit. Let’s embrace our humanity and recognize that tragedy is tragedy is tragedy. Sartre said “Hell is other people,” but Padusniak says we can prove him wrong.