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What If There Were No Food in New England
Aug. 20th, 2011 01:23 pmEntitlement is an essential concept when it comes to understanding biased behavior, whether it's racism, sexism, class advantage, heterosexual privilege; it's the key to recognizing the advantages that are invisible to the people who have them, but inescapably obvious to the people who don't. And because it's nearly impossible to avoid mentioning entitlement or privilege when discussing most of those topics, it's a word that has been flung around so much that it can become meaningless - if entitlement is everywhere, then it's nowhere specific. (Such a statement ignores degree, but this is what discourse has come to: ideological purity at the cost of utility.)
However, it occurs to me that as measures of entitlement go, we can once again return to the empathy test. I don't mean sympathy; the average socialite is overwhelmingly entitled but spends a lot of time going to charity balls and finding ways to donate money to "those poor [fill-in-the-blank]." We will note also the popularity of movies like The Help and The Blind Side with white Southern audiences; these are movies that ask us to identify not with the downtrodden, but with their noble rescuers.
I think of the people who can't imagine why a rape survivor would wait two days to report it, or would need phone conversations with friends to be convinced it was rape and worth reporting. I think of people who assume a roach-infested apartment is a sign of laziness rather than poverty that makes an exterminator unaffordable. I think of people who donate generously to their churches but think food stamps are a waste and have never used a payday loan to buy groceries.
What I'm talking about is the difference between viewing a group as a mass - women, blacks, the poor - which needs aid and protection, and being able to realistically imagine being one of them.
I've been puzzled by my lack of emotional response to the famine in Somalia, which I think is mostly a matter of finding it overwhelming, and being in a money bind where I literally can't afford to help in even a small way for this month or the next.* This leaves aside the logistical question of whether the U.N. can even get food aid into the region in a meaningful way, which has been a challenge. Not having an emotional response to the Somalian famine is thus a reasonable form of psychological protection, rather like ignoring the inevitability and unpredictability of one's own death.
Nevertheless, I am beginning to suspect it is also because although I am a writer and an actor I am completely unable to imagine walking for seven days without seeing anything I could eat - not just nothing I could afford to eat or nothing I was sure was safe to eat, but literally no edible thing, no garbage or tree bark, nothing. I can imagine being in the Donner party, being stuck and unable to reach the food. I can imagine being Robert Scott and unable to find my supply cache in Antarctica, or running out of food at sea. I can't imagine all the crops and livestock suddenly dead everywhere around me for hundreds of miles, but me still alive in the place where there used to be crops and livestock.
Most of all, I can't imagine the weeks or months leading up to that point. How are you still there? How are you not dead? What was the difference between two weeks ago and now, if there is one? What was the tipping point?
It is so far outside my experience it might as well be "what if I woke up on Mars one day, even though it doesn't have an atmosphere?" There is no connection between me and it. It is a cocktail party thought experiment at best. Which makes these people not real to me in a way I rarely find people not real. Human interest pieces on the news are not helping me with this.
It is also probably why I found The Road singularly unaffecting. That and I think Cormac McCarthy is full of shit.
*I don't want to go into it, but I am literally doing things like rolling pennies at the moment to stabilize a medical debt situation and the finalization of the film. It's a set of one-time costs I'll get past by mid-October, and I'll be able to squeak through, but with margins that don't allow me to overspend $5 on a meal between now and then. Meanwhile, I continue to live affluently, because I share a household with my parents, who are affluent, and who would definitely float me if it came down to the wire, without any kind of guilt trip. Which means a donation from me would ultimately be their discretionary income, which they already donate. I'd be stealing the right to feel good about the donation rather than changing the amount of money that goes to a place.
However, it occurs to me that as measures of entitlement go, we can once again return to the empathy test. I don't mean sympathy; the average socialite is overwhelmingly entitled but spends a lot of time going to charity balls and finding ways to donate money to "those poor [fill-in-the-blank]." We will note also the popularity of movies like The Help and The Blind Side with white Southern audiences; these are movies that ask us to identify not with the downtrodden, but with their noble rescuers.
I think of the people who can't imagine why a rape survivor would wait two days to report it, or would need phone conversations with friends to be convinced it was rape and worth reporting. I think of people who assume a roach-infested apartment is a sign of laziness rather than poverty that makes an exterminator unaffordable. I think of people who donate generously to their churches but think food stamps are a waste and have never used a payday loan to buy groceries.
What I'm talking about is the difference between viewing a group as a mass - women, blacks, the poor - which needs aid and protection, and being able to realistically imagine being one of them.
I've been puzzled by my lack of emotional response to the famine in Somalia, which I think is mostly a matter of finding it overwhelming, and being in a money bind where I literally can't afford to help in even a small way for this month or the next.* This leaves aside the logistical question of whether the U.N. can even get food aid into the region in a meaningful way, which has been a challenge. Not having an emotional response to the Somalian famine is thus a reasonable form of psychological protection, rather like ignoring the inevitability and unpredictability of one's own death.
Nevertheless, I am beginning to suspect it is also because although I am a writer and an actor I am completely unable to imagine walking for seven days without seeing anything I could eat - not just nothing I could afford to eat or nothing I was sure was safe to eat, but literally no edible thing, no garbage or tree bark, nothing. I can imagine being in the Donner party, being stuck and unable to reach the food. I can imagine being Robert Scott and unable to find my supply cache in Antarctica, or running out of food at sea. I can't imagine all the crops and livestock suddenly dead everywhere around me for hundreds of miles, but me still alive in the place where there used to be crops and livestock.
Most of all, I can't imagine the weeks or months leading up to that point. How are you still there? How are you not dead? What was the difference between two weeks ago and now, if there is one? What was the tipping point?
It is so far outside my experience it might as well be "what if I woke up on Mars one day, even though it doesn't have an atmosphere?" There is no connection between me and it. It is a cocktail party thought experiment at best. Which makes these people not real to me in a way I rarely find people not real. Human interest pieces on the news are not helping me with this.
It is also probably why I found The Road singularly unaffecting. That and I think Cormac McCarthy is full of shit.
*I don't want to go into it, but I am literally doing things like rolling pennies at the moment to stabilize a medical debt situation and the finalization of the film. It's a set of one-time costs I'll get past by mid-October, and I'll be able to squeak through, but with margins that don't allow me to overspend $5 on a meal between now and then. Meanwhile, I continue to live affluently, because I share a household with my parents, who are affluent, and who would definitely float me if it came down to the wire, without any kind of guilt trip. Which means a donation from me would ultimately be their discretionary income, which they already donate. I'd be stealing the right to feel good about the donation rather than changing the amount of money that goes to a place.
