bennie and the jets

The title of this post has zero to do with its content; I just downloaded one of Elton John's greatest hits albums and am simply enjoying it.

This post is about empathy, and how quickly we as humans forget that other humans are just that. Being human is a consistently amazing thing for plenty of reasons, one of which is our ability to acknowledge the pain and suffering of the world and similarly ignore it completely. It's not insensitivity, rather survival. We literally cannot absorb the abstract notion that while our consciousness continues and our worlds remain untouched, people are being tortured, raped, killed, bought, sold, and to a lesser degree hungry, cold, poor, and spit upon for reasons unfounded. I write this as a human, as someone who goes through life knowing the sadness of others but ignoring it to stave off my own. It's easier to laugh at things that those whom we don't understand or agree with do, or to immediately sympathize without true sympathy. We whittle our worlds down, and in doing so forget that the other people who walk the same streets as we do are so much closer to us than we think; they feel the same feelings, love their mothers, hate their jobs, smile at the sun, are insecure about their opinions, curse traffic, don't understand politics, could always use more money, think their significant other is sexier than yours, have no idea what they're doing on this planet, and drink too much coffee. We are so quick to judge because, if we didn't, if we truly accepted that other people were just like us, we would lose our individuality and what we believe really does make us human, our unique perception of the world.

I'm reading the book Better by Atul Gawande, a chapter of which you can check out here.

Health care is such a big issue these days and this is just one subset thereof, but it definitely plays into the idea that so many wish were true that there is a bad vs good, right vs wrong. Everyone should get free health care, or noone should get free health care. Doctors are making money off of our pain, or doctors are saints. Because we lack empathy, we cannot imagine that, like us, most people don't fall into categories of extremes. Overall, in any arena of life, our need for simplification and for there to be someone to pay for wrongs that are attributable not to evil but to human error, is pushing us further away from solutions to problems that aren't going away. Gawande is a physician and writer, and his book documents the ins and outs of doctorhood from the importance and evolution of hand washing, to the difficulty of eradicating a disease, to the flawed system of malpractice lawsuits against doctors. The latter is what I'm currently reading about, which prompted this post. Gawande describes the frustration and humiliation inherent in dealing with a malpractice case, the horror that comes along with being blamed for someone's pain or even death. The flaw in the system stems not from the need for humans to feel reimbursed for such negligence, but rather the immense trust and faith we put into doctors and the medical system, and our instantaneous vilification of them when something goes wrong. We set doctors so high because we can't bear thinking that our health is in the hands of someone less than perfect and, in creating in our mind gods who can bring us back to life, are of course let down by the fact that they are indeed just like us, ultimately defined by their failures.