What position is your empathy switch in?
I’m a few chapters into Brian Goldman’s new book, The Power of Kindness, about his journey to figure out what happened to his capacity for empathy over a career as an emergency physician. Goldman’s first stop takes him to some researchers from Laval University in Quebec, who tell him that everyone empathizes – that it’s natural and instinctive for human beings to feel what others feel.
But ER docs, surgeons and others like them specialize in turning off the empathy. It helps them not to empathize when they see someone’s child wheeled in with a gunshot wound. It is hard to carry that much emotion and keep a head clear enough to figure out where the bleeding might be, and hands steady enough to fix it. They have an empathy switch that they can turn off when they need to.
Someone’s child got wheeled into an emergency room near me this past week. His name was Jonathan Freeman, and he never made it out. My switch will not go off. Jonathan had my name, lived less than two miles from my house, and was in the same grade at the same school as my own son. Parts of their biographies read almost the same: honors/AP student, coming out of his shell, someone who made other kids laugh. His mother is a teacher. Like my wife. I cannot help but feel that pain.
I fear that I’m in a minority here, though. Sources interviewed for the articles about Jonathan’s murder used cliché phrases like, “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” as if a 16-year-old playing video games at a friend’s house is somehow at fault for getting shot to death. How about, “The shooter was in the wrong place, at the wrong time, doing the wrong thing to the wrong person?”
After the last tragedy in my neighborhood, there was an overwhelming outpouring of grief and support. There were vigils all over town, attended by thousands of people. When former President Bush died, flags flew at half-mast for a month (some folks have apparently forgotten to raise them back to full-staff). I can’t even find an address online to send support to Jonathan’s family. The switch is off.
Yesterday, my friend Seth Goldstein was commenting on the final segment of the Exodus story. He dealt with a passage that always troubles people: the idea that God hardened Pharoah’s heart to not let the Israelites go, until the plagues had been completed. So how could Pharoah be to blame?
In different words, Seth explained that God made our empathy switches so that, once we turned them to “off” enough times, they can’t easily be turned back on anymore. For the first five plagues, Pharoah can let the Israelites go. He feels empathy for them, and for his own people’s suffering in the plague. He turns it off. After a certain point, he’s too far gone to feel anything – until his own son is taken from him.
That had better not be what it takes to get the rest of us to turn our switches back on, whether we work in ERs, ORs, or whether we just are. Personally, I’m doing to my empathy switch what I’ve done to the light switch in my basement that controls the outlet where the freezer and fridge are. I’m putting a big piece of duct tape over it that says, “Empathy Switch: DO NOT TURN OFF!”
Addendum 1/24/19
Thank you to Shelley Bradbury of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for filling in the blanks for me. There is a GoFundMe page for Jonathan Freeman’s family, which you can access here. Please reach out to them.
