Have you no sense of empathy, sir? A DIATRIBE.

I wasn’t going to talk about this, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and it gets to the crux of much that we believe here at the Magpies’ head offices, so here we go: The suggestion that somebody only cares about the future of the country or society if they, themselves, have given birth to a child is so strange, so wrong, and so telling in so many ways that I’ve been talking about it in my head to myself for days.

Does that mean that the entire history of our nation, written, mostly, by men for men, was written by people who had never given birth and therefore didn’t care about the future of our country or society? Well, that explains a lot. A lot.

Not caring about anything unless it directly impacts you and your family is not only sociopathic, but it also demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding about how society works, and anybody who doesn’t understand how society works should not be in any elected position that allows them to determine how society works.

Even on the most fundamentally selfish level, wherein you might say, “Why do I pay taxes to support public education when I don’t have a child in school?” You do so because you want to live in a society of educated people who can grow up to further the workings of your society. At the most basic selfish level, you do that. Not even because teaching people about actual history helps us to keep from repeating the same horrible mistakes we’ve made in the past, not even because educating people can lead to advances in medicine that can save lives, not even because a good education can teach people the power of creativity and help them to create art and music and literature and films that enrich the world and make life worth living, that inspire and create hope, not even because learning is fun, acquiring knowledge makes people happy and eager to learn more and we like people to be happy, especially when it’s about something important. Not even any of that.

The network that supports and connects us is so important and so fragile. We talk about the vulnerable falling through the cracks, but we’re all vulnerable, we are all “those people.” It requires faith to sustain it, faith in ourselves and in our neighbors — our neighbors all across the whole wide country. And it requires empathy.

And we are witnessing such an epically fundamental misunderstanding or devaluing of empathy that I could cry. This is where we get all Magpiesy. It’s all about Alyosha, again. Alyosha tells his friend, “Do you know, Lise, my elder told me once to care for most people exactly as one would for children, and for some of them as one would for the sick in hospitals.” Not our children. Not OUR CHILDREN, all children. And we’re thinking of everyone we meet in this way, whatever their age may be. We’re thinking, this person might have sadness and worries and cares and hopes and dreams just like I do, just like we all do. Searcheth hearts, searcheth hearts. I’m sorry, but if the religion these men proselytize about so much that they want to foist it on the entire country isn’t teaching them this, then either it is fundamentally flawed or they are fundamentally and willfully misunderstanding it.

You don’t have to have a child to care about other children, let alone about all other people. And, bewilderingly many of these men don’t seem to care about children at all — theirs or anybody else’s. They’re sending other people’s children (and we’re all somebody’s child) off to war for their own profit, or sending weapons to kill other children around the world (and, honestly, why do I pay taxes to kill other people’s children? Why?), or providing guns to any and everyone to please their lobbyists, or taking away health insurance, tearing families apart and deporting them, or rolling back regulations for their own profit and the profit of their lobbyists so that nobody’s children — not theirs or anybody else’s — will have much of a world to live on before we know it. That’s cynical, that’s depressed and depressing, that’s having no hope for the future and no concern or care for the country or anything else. That’s maddeningly hypocritical.

I would say to them, if you want some help learning empathy for others, which you clearly need, get a service job. Spend some time healing or teaching or feeding others. You will learn to care for them. You will see the poignance in our fragile connections, the strength in recognizing our shared loneliness, our shared absurdity. You will learn to think of something other than yourself and your profit. Perhaps you will develop some of that hope for the future of our country you claim to value so, despite all your seeming efforts to tear us apart at the seams.

The idea that one man only cares about anything as it affects his immediate family is especially ridiculous because I believe that this notion of caring for others and recognizing that everything is connected extends beyond people. We need to respect and revere that connection or we are lost. We don’t understand the way everything moves and changes around us … the way plants grow and animals talk to one another, what the birds are saying when they sing, the cycle of rain and waves and wind. We don’t understand it and never will, but we are part of it and lucky to be so. You want to learn the value of life? walk in a field, care for a garden, clean the litter in a forest, grow your own food. Or care for a dog — they will teach you empathy! — or a cat, or the crows talking to each other in your backyard. And it extends beyond life in the world as we know it to the worlds that we create in our heads. Care for something you create, a character you invent, a drawing you make, a dinner you cook. Or something you appreciate — a song you love, your favorite scene in a movie. Share those things with others, and you will see how that sustains and nourishes and connects us, because that is important, too.

We’re all in it together: opining, reasoning, hoping, and fearing. The workings of the world are unfathomable, the threads that hold us together in societies and communities are complicated and fragile. There is no end of things in the human heart. All we can do is hope. All we have is kindness.

What a remarkable issue of Tidings of Magpies we share this month! Full of such treasures. As ever, I am beyond grateful to everyone who shared their remarkable work and words with us. Please take the time to read, and, as ever, submit, support, subscribe. And have a look at Tidings of Magpies on Instagram.