We Need To Hold Each Other Up
On empathy and how, especially now, it’s the individual acts of reaching out that matter
I flew with a dead body recently. I didn’t know that during the flight, though. When our Delta flight landed at Dulles, the captain asked us all to remain seated while a few others exited the plane first. We found out we’d been carrying the body of a US soldier escorted by his family and a decorated Army officer in full dress. They were on their way to a resting place near the capital. Per the captain’s instructions, all other passengers needed to wait until the officer and the soldier’s family had cleared the aisle. Truthfully, my first thought was about my own connecting flight and how I’d now have to run to make it.
Earlier, just after I’d boarded the plane, one of the flight attendants made the standard safety announcement. But her speech was clumsy. She struggled through several sentences before saying, “I can hardly talk today. This is just one of those days.” I assumed she was was tired. Or not a great public speaker. Or otherwise disengaged from her job.
I also confess that I detest the canned safety speeches to a perhaps unhealthy level. In general, I can’t abide being told the same thing over and over again, as if I didn’t already understand from the first explanation. So instead of listening, I tuck in my earbuds, turn up a podcast or playlist, and — literally — tune out.
Like a veteran teacher, though, the airlines plan for this. Their speakers trump the loudest volume my headphones can muster, so I’m forced to hear once again how I should put my oxygen mask on first, where to find the many exits built into the plane, how — in the case of an emergency — we will definitely save ourselves.
Why is it that when you get into an Uber, the driver doesn’t explain how to buckle your seatbelt, but on a plane, which is statistically much safer, there is only a base assumption made about your intelligence?
Educators are often reminded, “You are your students.” Still, it was easy to forget I was sometimes the loudspeaker being tuned out.
For ten years, I taught college writing and literature courses, most recently as an assistant professor at a small, public university out west. Ignoring instructions is a favorite pastime of students everywhere, but lately it seems students tend to ignore curriculum that doesn’t confirm their own biases, as if the classroom should be a curated social media feed.
In a graduate-level essay-writing course last spring, I assigned Claire Vaye Watkins’s “On Pandering,” which argues that women should write toward a different sensibility than the traditional white men of the canon because those white men wrote to and for themselves. In the piece, Watkins shares an anecdote in which the writer and editor Stephen Elliott aggressively attempts to sleep in her bed after giving a reading in her town. Later, he publicly dismisses her narrative of the event as well as her ability to understand her own experience, stripping her of any identity beyond “girl.”
One of my male grad students responded to the essay by attempting to deconstruct Watkins’s claims but ended up making an apologist argument for sexual assault. In the class discussion board, I tried to use this as a teachable moment regarding empathy. When the student’s language became grossly offensive, I shut the public discussion down and invited him to continue the conversation with me privately. I hoped to serve as a sounding board for him to articulate his hegemonic beliefs until he either reaffirmed or refuted them, to help him hear himself. He never took up the invite.
I know I’m overeducated because I can properly use words like “hegemonic.” In the decade that I’ve been in grad school and teaching, I’ve spent more time with big L Literature than I’ve spent with my family. So, I’m aware of what the arguments are about language and power and politics in a way my students don’t yet or maybe won’t think about, and though great strides have been made toward a more inclusive perspective, people teaching the canon generally aren’t clamoring for change. In light of that, I assign lots of readings from women, people of color, and other voices from marginalized groups. I don’t deserve a pat on the back for it; these populations have been long-overlooked by the academy and the works themselves simply deserve to be read. This just seems reasonable to me.
But in Trump’s America, I’m an excellent fit for the professor watchlist. I do indeed have a pedagogical agenda. My agenda is equanimity, tolerance, fair representation, and critical thinking. When it comes to our electoral politics, one political party has aligned itself with these goals and the other, well, has not. As a result, it’s difficult to explain the importance of reaching out to each other as humans without it being read as politically partisan, without some students rolling their eyes and tuning out, sick of hearing the same lesson, only louder. They feel their right not to empathize is under assault, though they wouldn’t articulate it that way. Empathy, it seems, is also a partisan issue.
It’s difficult to enthusiastically embrace ideas that seem simplistic or set against my own sense of basic human rights. And yet that’s the job of a teacher, witnessing the draft, visualizing the polished version, and helping reshape that more informed iteration. When students tune out from that process, I’m never sure if I’m doing a bad job or if there’s a point beyond which it’s impossible to find common ground.
Before the plane landed at Dulles, that same, exhausted-sounding flight attendant sighed her way into a new announcement. I’d seen her walking the aisles, a lovely-seeming spirit with a collection of gray curls above her head and the courtesy to tap passengers on the knee before rolling a beverage cart by them. “This is just one of those times,” she said, exhaling as if the entire plane were on her back. “Just . . . peace and love, y’all.”
While we waited to deplane, I crouched under the overhead bin, my impatience over my connection simmering. And then I saw, at the back of the aircraft, a woman trying to walk up the aisle. She wore sunglasses and she wept, asking, “How could they take my baby?” At first I didn’t notice the silver-curled flight attendant holding up the woman.
The flight attendant had wrapped the mother in a hug from the front, walking backwards with her up the tight aisle the length of the plane in a slow dance of grief. The mother, for her part, allowed herself to be carried forward, held by this stranger. It was the most aspirationally American thing I have ever seen — a reminder that maybe our collective greatness is not so much extinguished as it is all too often invisible to each other.
I never learned the flight attendant’s name, but, when walking into the jetway, I barely made out a “Thank you.”
Writers sometimes suggest that all writing can be reduced to one thing. All writing is about death or all writing is about love. I believe that to write is to apologize. We write to say we are sorry to our younger selves, our families, our enemies. To that end, I’m sorry to have not more emphatically thanked the flight attendant. I’m certainly deeply sorry for the loss of a mother’s son. I’m sorry we can’t all find common ground like the mother and flight attendant in times that, we all seem to believe, are trying and hard and full of high stakes.
But we can look at people like those two women and realize that we still can reach out to each other, that as a safety precaution maybe it’s better not to buckle yourself to your seat but instead strap yourself to whatever heavy thing needs holding up.
