As I risk my life on a daily basis to move around this town on a bike I’ve noticed a phenomenon I’m inclined to attribute to “toxic empathy”, an idea that started getting traction when a “sharp, Christian voice” pointed out the left-wing cynicism hijacking human compassion and empathy. Here’s a blurb:
A sharp Christian voice makes a bold argument: when politics are driven by empathy rather than truth, innocent people pay the price. We are told that empathy is the highest virtue–the key to being a good person. Is that true? Or has “empathy,” like so many other words of our day– “tolerance,” “justice,” “acceptance”–been hijacked by bad actors who exploit compassion for their own political ends? In Toxic Empathy, Allie Beth Stuckey argues that empathy has become a tool of manipulation by left-wing activists who bully people into believing that they must adopt progressive positions to be loving. She explores the five most heated issues through which toxic empathy is deployed: abortion, gender, sexuality, immigration, and social justice.
With this idea in mind, the situation that the above image shows is a scenario I have experienced many times in Missoula and it’s beyond frustrating, it’s fucking dangerous.
Here’s what happens: a motorist operating an automobile sees me, the person on the bike, and they are so overcome with caring and, I guess, appreciation that I’m saving the planet with my multi-modal form of transportation, that they decide the laws of the road should be momentarily halted. That’s right, they literally stop when they absolutely should NOT be stopping, and they’re usually smiling benevolently at me until the confusion sets in that I’m refusing their stupid generosity and waving them along.
When I saw someone else this morning annoyed af at this type of behavior in Missoula, it was nice to see I’m not the only one perturbed at this dangerous behavior.
What might seem rather harmless is, I believe, indicative of an entire generation of aging liberal Boomers acting on their deteriorating cognitive abilities by getting tunnel vision when their “empathy bone” gets tapped, and it’s been getting tapped by some VERY malevolent forces for VERY insidious goals.
This is how the insane, absurd, and often times harmful COVID-19 policies were able to be implemented by the psychopath class, something many of those empathic people who took the jab would prefer to pretend didn’t happen in the way it actually happened.
Do these motorists understand why the rules of the road exist? The idea (before cops turned laws into opportunities for subjective enforcement based on profiling) is that laws provide predictability so that chaos doesn’t ensue. When you throw that shit out, the probability of bad outcomes increases.
Wouldn’t it be cool if we fixed this problem of misapplied empathy before we create unrealistic expectations and entitlements for upcoming generations?
Yeah, that would be cool.
Thanks for reading!
I remember when the Missoula Independent and other local media would occasionally educate locals about this kind of thing, before Martin “Gomer” Kidston and Matt “fuckface” Gibson destroyed the local media climate. Incidentally, the gentrification wave that displaced so many thousands of Missoula locals ALSO resulted in fewer bicyclists. Compared to how many bikes I used to see throughout Missoula in 2019, it’s an automobile-dominated ghost town but for the very few and far between who still bike around. The latest turnout of university students mostly seem to have new cars that their wealthy parents bought them. Nobody bikes anymore.
Ha! I’m glad this report from the trenches of multi-modal gauntlet running resonates. If you see me on a Russell sidewalk it’s straight up survival!
Yes, I agree. This also shows its face with people who slam on their brakes to (empathically) allow another motorist going in the opposite direction to make a left turn in front of them, sometimes forcing the person behind them to also slam on their brakes to avoid a rear end collision. Nice perhaps, but completely unnecessary and often unsafe. It is thoughtful to stop in such a way as to leave an intersection or driveway access open, thus allowing others to make the turn, but only proper when the traffic in front of you has already braked to a dead stop. It is discourteous to motorists behind you and really stupid to do this when traffic is flowing smoothly.
BTW, if you could create an app that would sync traffic lights to smart phones so as to alert the nincompoops who are absorbed in their texts when the light turns green, that would be awesome. Wouldn’t take much, maybe a sound like a horn blaring and a message flashing at them to “Get off your phone and drive!”