Who Cares?

Who we care about and why we care about them tells other people a lot about who we are and what kind of morals we have. I am not referring to personal family, lovers and friends. I mean, who does a person invest their moral and political passion in?

I was thinking about this today as my Army buddy Tom and I walked around the festivities in Golden Gate Park held in honor of the annual AIDS walk. Thousands of people had turned out, many carrying placards bearing pictures of a loved one they had lost to the disease and others bringing panels for the AIDS quilt, a section of which was displayed on “Hippie Hill” near the Haight street entrance to the park.

Tom seldom talks about his brother Michael, whom he lost to the disease, but today he did. In a voice thick with emotion he said “If Michael had come to live with me here in San Francisco back when he wanted to he would probably still be alive. Here in the city he would have had access to information on AIDS prevention and even if he had still gotten it there is a large network of medical and social services available that he could never have found at home. Saint Paul killed my brother.”

As Tom described his part of the Twin Cities the place was a sinkhole of prejudices and enforced ignorance back in the 1980’s with virtually no awareness programs and no medical support for the Gay community of any kind. “The way they see it,” Tom said, “is if you are Gay you can just go right ahead an die. It’s your fault even if you have never heard of AIDS in your life.”

Perhaps he is right, I don’t know, but I do know that my Aunt Kathryn was one of the nicest, most caring people I have ever known, a pillar of her church and a ready volunteer for any good cause that needed her help. She would be well into her 70’s by now but she died of AIDS in the early 1990’s contracted from a blood transfusion after a minor operation. The same governmental indifference and political infighting over what was considered the “Gay disease” killed her just as surely as it killed Michael.

To this day I still encounter people who consider themselves to be kind and moral people who remain indifferent to the plague because it “only kills those people,” as though one’s sexual orientation was sufficient cause for a person to die.

Each year 3.1 million people die from HIV related causes, 20,000 of them in this country alone and yet there are a lot of people to whom the deaths of an estimated two to three thousand damaged fetuses is a cause for deep concern and violent emotions while the deaths from AIDS are only a statistic.

Why should this be? Why is one group of more importance than another? I believe it is because, for some people at least, it isn’t about the lives of “real” people at all but rather it is about how they feel about themselves. For example there are many people who do not like the sort of women who break with their “traditional” roles and these people seek to punish those women for being different. For this sort of person the hypothetical life of a possibly deformed or mentally retarded fetus, who may not even survive birth in any event, is secondary to the chance to impose their values on the hated group.

That is why they so stridently ignore any evidence that the D&X procedure is necessary to the life or health of the woman. Who cares? They don’t know them or their “child” and will most likely never meet them. If someone hadn’t told them that these people even existed they would have no way of finding out but now that they do know about them they are able to feel smug and morally superior to someone else, a wonderful compensation for their normal feelings of inadequacy.

I met and worked with Eric Hoffer, the “longshoreman philosopher” when I was working the docks as a summer job back in high school. A totally self educated man he was considered by many intellectuals the best read and most learned man of his generation. Before he died many famous universities granted him advanced degrees based on his writings alone.

In his book “The True Believer” he dissects the sort of person who passionately advocates a cause and refuses to be swayed by facts or rational argument. As he put it “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for lost faith in ourselves.”

Those sorts of people who passionately proclaim that nothing you can say and no facts that you can show them will change their mind have all but admitted that the question is not about truth at all but about what they WANT to believe. As Eric put it “Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.”

How we see others is often only a reflection of how we see ourselves so when someone tells me “There are an awful lot of irresponsible, self centered, selfish women out there…” I get the distinct impression that they believe that they will see one of those women if they look in the mirror. That is not, by the way my opinion of them, I believe however that it is their opinion of themselves.

For others it is the sense of striking back at the world that they see as mocking and persecuting them that is the lure. “A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.”

This fills me with a great sadness. I have come to like some of these people very much and have seen their good and bad sides just as they have seen mine. They are, at heart, good and loving people who feel deep passions and who often hurt so much precisely because they care so much.

The world has not always been kind to these people and has bruised them with its rough edges. Being passionate and intelligent people they have perhaps felt these bruises more deeply than less passionate or intelligent people might have and this has shaken their faith in the world and in themselves. I don't know who said it but is true. "A cynic is a disappointed optimist.

A lot of their anger at the world and at the people who they see as wicked and immoral is really them projecting their feelings for themselves onto others.

How we see others is a very good indication of how we see ourselves.