At the brand new Everglades immigration detention center that officials have dubbed “ Alligator Alcatraz,” people held there say worms turn up in the food. Toilets don’t flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, and mosquitoes and other insects are everywhere.
Inside the compound’s large white tents, rows of bunkbeds are surrounded by chain-link cages. Detainees are said to go days without showering or getting prescription medicine, and they are only able to speak by phone to lawyers and loved ones. At times the air conditioners abruptly shut off in the sweltering heat.
Days after Donald Trump toured it, attorneys, advocates, detainees and their relatives are speaking out about the makeshift facility, which Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration raced to build on an isolated airstrip surrounded by swampland. Detainees began arriving July 2.
One thing that really saddens me in all… this (gestures broadly at everything) is that I have no idea how to deal with people with no empathy, with people who think this is okay. I just really do not know what to say an how to say it.
I’ve been raised with empathy. I knew even before going to kindergarten that it’s more fun to share some of my toys with other kids because then we can all play together. I knew that doing nice things for others gives you that warm fuzzy feeling. I learned that helping people is GOOD.
And I just don’t know how to deal with people who have not. I don’t know how to deal with people who will put other people in cages just because they look vaguely Latino, without due process. I don’t know how to deal with people that cheer for that. I just don’t know. How the fuck do I, do we, deal with people who have no empathy whatsoever? Not a rhetorical question by the way, I hope someone can explain it to me like I’m overly sensitive empathetic five-year old…
How to deal with them?..
ARM UP
By not engaging with them. No, I’m not going to try and “change their minds”, because I consider them to be a lost cause. I learned this years ago as a vegan.
For sake of mental health, it’s best to just move on and engage with those who are more receptive and show a shred of humanity.
Music brought a black man and a Klan member together. That kinda thing happened hundreds of times.
It’s too tall an order for almost any mortal. Want to believe it’s true, though, and not impossible.
Sure, that’s definitely an option that would be healthier/easier for me personally, but can you really disengage when people in government build concentration camps and secret police force? I’m not even American or in America and it’s just overwhelming…
My point is that it is not productive to engage in people who have no empathy, because it won’t actually accomplish anything. It is a wasted effort.
It’s sort of along the lines of the Serenity Prayer. They fall under the “things I cannot change.”
You can if you’d arm up
Yeah, then what, Buffalo Bill? Shoot at what, who?
Everyone knows how to deal with them. You just refuse to.
I find I have little to no choice but to withdraw from as much as possible from the world. By world I mean people, since they are 100% of the causes of the problems I can do nothing about.
https://youtu.be/5f9R9MtkpqM
Brilliant lecture, and it points out the reasons for fundamental differences in morality, but apart from calling things by different names (vide Alligator Auschwitz in this very post), which is a great succession, it doesn’t give me much actionable advice.
Still fascinating though - them you so much for posting it here! I want to listen to/read more things by him now!