It’s Labor Day, 2021, and I’m not laboring. I’m sitting at home, taking it—sort of—easy while I type out this post. I have several reasons for not working today. First, it’s just kind of a tradition that folks rest on Labor Day, a day set aside to honor the nation’s workers. Second, I’m old and should be retired—but I’m not. Third, I had surgery a few days ago and I’m still recovering. But, even later, when most folks will return to the daily grind—and even if I were fully healthy—I’m not sure I’d be willing to take on a new job I recently sought after.
My Lack of Empathy
I’d long fancied the idea of teaching, particularly of teaching English and writing. So, despite my advanced age, I recently went through the hoops to become qualified to work as a substitute teacher. I’ve blocked out my schedule for the next few weeks of my recovery, but even after that period, I’m feeling hesitant about entering a classroom. Until recently I’d assumed that schoolteachers have a cushy job. Loads of vacation times throughout the summers and the holidays. And the workdays would consist of little more than a few lectures, some homework assignments, grading, and maintaining a reasonable level of classroom discipline. I’ve since come to understand that those seemingly easy elements are not so easy. In fact, they’re downright demanding.
And now, on top of those ongoing burdens, schoolteachers face the daily threat of contracting and/or spreading a potentially deadly virus. Here in Colorado’s El Paso County, teachers and staff members are required to wear masks, but mask-wearing is optional for students. And how many students do you know who would choose to wear a mask if his or her peers are not doing so? So, in any typical classroom, dozens of potential disease vectors are sitting within a few feet of each other. They’re also eating lunches within inches of one another in cafeterias, bumping into one another in hallways, coughing, sneezing, high-fiving, and rubbing surfaces faster than any custodians can cope with.
A General Lack of Empathy
Such teaching-related burdens and concerns failed to cross my mind before I sought to enter the teaching field. And that common cognitive failure is an even bigger concern than the specific threats to teachers. Too many of us, regardless of our occupation or background, lack empathy; we don’t truly comprehend and properly react to a threat until it directly affects us. If we get our news from sources other than the blatantly subjective “conservative news” sources such as Fox or Newsmax, then we’ve seen and heard plenty of stories about folks who denied the reality and/or severity of COVID until they caught it and found themselves on ventilators in the ICU. “I wish,” I’ve heard many of them lament from their hospital beds, “I’d taken this virus seriously. I wish I’d gotten the vaccine. I now want my friends and family members to get vaccinated.”
Empathy serves humanity as more than just a means for eliciting beneficial responses after trials and tragedies hit. Empathy also can be an especially effective educator—it can teach us to be preemptive and proactive, if we pay attention and respond appropriately. I suspect that if more Americans had responded to the COVID pandemic in an empathetic manner, we’d have had far fewer than the current 660,000 U.S. COVID deaths. If more Americans had reacted to the pandemic by considering the well-being of all our neighbors, we’d see the infection and death rates dropping rather than again increasing.
On this Labor Day, I pray we learn from our mistakes. I pray we become a more empathetic society. I pray our lessons will not have to be learned at the cost of losing thousands of our neighbors daily.
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