We tend to look at the direct outcomes of large problems, but less often the smaller ones.
I picture children growing up with fathers gone all the time fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere. These children were told their fathers were off fighting to keep them free.
Then Afghanistan falls in a month, after some 20 years of conflict, and even our allies are stranded, their names given to our enemies, and the whole thing falls apart in a whiff of smoke.
What child could or would excuse that, when they grew up without a father? What use was ANY of that?
Or take an Afghan girl of 8-13 years old. She had been hoping to begin school. I myself have contributed a number of times to groups educating young girls in that part of the world.
She was looking forward to school, but now her destiny might be that of child bride. School is out of the question. Whatever hopes she had are now gone.
Empathy is really two things: understanding yourself, and possessing the capacity for imagination. I don’t find it hard to feel in myself the horror such girls must feel, looking at this future, of bearded misogynistic psychopaths. They have no escape but death, and some of them will most likely choose that path.
This world is filled with ugly and indefensible and OBVIOUS lies. All good people with educations like mine should be seeing what is going on, and standing up for what is obviously right, and opposing lies and greed wherever they find them.
That such people are missing in action, by and large, is a big part of why things suck as much as they do.
I am an anomaly. I should have plenty of intellectual company out there. It’s not absent, but the volume should be much greater. Chicago and Berkeley graduate a lot of people. And most of them side with the horror and the lies. Sooner or later, they start telling the lies themselves. They flip, fully. They become Headless Ones.