Elle Sagar
Jul 21, 2017 · 2 min read

So a few weeks ago — when Steve Scalise was shot — you made precisely this same argument. And there was a brouhaha.

And then a while later (or was it before? Time no longer has much meaning when it comes to these things), you made the same argument in your piece Palindrome. And there was another brouhaha.

Both times, I agreed with you and loathed myself for it. I could neither fault your logic nor the progression of your thinking, so I was left loathing myself for tacitly agreeing and being unable to marshal the moral whatsit to challenge you.

I hated that I agreed. I’m trying to be a decent human being, I told myself. I should never get to the point where my Empathy Well could run dry. “How does that happen?”, I wailed.

How? You come to this country (or you’re born into it), and everywhere you turn is brutality and death and zero recognition of your pain. In my case, 16 years as an immigrant and four or five as an observer of the American body politic and the (empathy) well was drier than the Mojave.

I’ve been thinking at length (and worrying)about what it means when empathy dies; what it will signify for this nation but frankly, much as I’d like to wax poetic about the topic, I gots nothin’. I don’t know what it might mean but I do know that that day is coming. And clearly, not just for me.

As a nation, there is a moral deficit so great that I’m not entirely sure it’s a fillable hole. I’ve managed to write a little about that, but to take it the next step and discuss what that means for us going forward?

Truth to tell, it’s not that I gots nothin’ eh, it is that what comes next to my mind is conflagration and I’d rather not write about that.

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    Elle Sagar

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