The gilded age of narcissism

To feel empathy for another person doesn't require that you like or agree with them. It simply means you acknowledge they have emotions as well about the matter between you, and that their thoughts and feelings are as weighty to them as yours are to you.

It's only April and we've already had three throwbacks to the era of Jim Crow: the OU frat bus, happily belting out racist chants (Oklahoma); the discovery of racist behaviors and protocols in Ferguson's law enforcement system (Missouri); and the shooting of an African American man, Walter Scott, by former police officer Michael Slager (South Carolina). 

Where has the majority of words and energy gone? 

• Beauton Gilbow, the SAE house mother caught on video chanting racist slurs, lamented to news cameras that her way of life was ending. Fifteen years she'd been house mom at SAE and now she had to move out. What heartbreak! And such inconvenience.

• Parents of the two bus chant "leaders," the Rice and Pettit families moved like PR firms to pony up eloquent apologies, then begged for privacy so their families could "heal," never mind that the chant was an obscenity to African American members of the OU community. The world at large was still processing how two college men in the year 2015 could even chant such songs without qualm.

• Former Officer Slager's mom shook her head in TV news interviews, lamenting her son wouldn't be in the delivery room to see his child born, never mind that Walter Scott will be permanently absent from his family's big events. 

• Perhaps the most outrageous was Ferguson's clerk of court, Mary Ann Twitty, who made the hyperbolic equation that being exposed for circulating racist emails felt like a sexual assault. "I'm a good person," she insisted, "and I feel like I've been raped."

We are mere props in the movie of her life
The fact is Twitty has experienced neither racism nor rape. If she had, she'd have never made that analogy — nor found those jokes funny. But as with the others, her account of herself does point to a startling lack of empathy. Sure, there's been some public, scripted chest-beating but none of them have asked humble questions to learn the full scope of what they'd done. Their concerns have been for themselves, nobody else. Being exposed simply made such individuals even more self-absorbed — and that is its own set of red flags.

Write a Wrong

The erosion of civil liberties is like that frog in the pan of water. If you'd told Germans back in the 1930s: "The good news is that a leader will emerge to unite everyone and re-energize national pride. The bad news is that he'll institute racism and anti-Semitism into law, including eugenics, and trigger a Holocaust, followed by years of defeat, separatism, and economic depression," then most forward-thinking Germans might have balked at Hitler's initial allure. 

Toss a frog into a pan of boiling hot water, and it'll jump out.

But that's not how things evolved: what Hitler triggered was a steady but gradual degradation of civil liberties and human rights. Each one was abhorrent, but they didn't affect everyone — they just affected Jews, gays, the infirm and disabled, scholars/intellectuals, and gypsies — anyone the Nazis deemed unfit. Hitler also eliminated all the detractors and men of conscience who would've put his subversive plans through legal checks and balances. His ascendency was so lethal, few dared to speak dissent. Those who did were summarily snuffed out.

Toss a frog into a pan of cold water and heat it up slowly. What happens? The frog boils to death because it doesn't know to jump out at the first signs of trouble, so it weakens and submits.

• Ferguson, Missouri, has been exposed as one of the most corrupt and racist judicial systems in the US. Is it typical or an anomaly? 

• This year is the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. Will anyone care? or will we be busy gerrymandering, cooking up legal mumbo-jumbo to deprive "otherized" Americans of their right to cast a vote? 

• These RFRA bills — if they succeed in institutionalizing discrimination against LGBT communities, then how long before another segment of American community is targeted? Religious freedom is the right to worship in one's own way, free of persecution, not to be used as a weapon against someone else (or have such individuals never noticed what's been going on in the Middle East? Taliban? ISIS? Boko Haram? Hello...?). Since when was the Bible intended to be a "law book" used against humanity?

Our current dysfunctional Congress has the scruples of a streetwalker, our democracy is becoming oligarchic, yet we saw Indiana governor Mike Pence squirm and reverse his position when business leaders, small business owners, LGBT activists, and ordinary people presented a unified front against a divisive and spiteful piece of legislation.

It's not just about protecting one's own civil liberties. If we don't protect the civil liberties of the targeted, weak, and vulnerable among us, then the bullies will have won the day. Make penpals of your Congressmen. Until this nation decides on term limits, these folks in Congress lead country-club lifestyles often without careful study of the bills they're expected to vote on. They may not heed one voice, but eventually they will have to listen to a growing number of voices. No matter which side of the issue you fall on, speak your truth to power. The world is run by those who are present and get involved.

Hold their feet to the fire.