Just an Ounce of Empathy

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Disability was one noteworthy theme during the presentations Monday night at the Democratic National Convention—how we perceive it, how we react to it, how we treat those with serious physical and mental limitations. It is no small subject, and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump did himself no favors earlier in the year with his mocking imitation of a New York Times reporter, which the Democrats have already been using in ads to question his character. And rightly, for it does make you wonder what prompted such an immature outburst.

But I am not writing to dwell on the missteps of Trump, nor on the virtues of Hillary Clinton in this regard as extolled by speakers with disabilities on the stage in Philadelphia. That comparison is one of many people can decide for themselves. I am about to suggest a simple way of thinking about the issue that all of us can readily use even if we are not among the estimated 56 million Americans afflicted with such shortcomings.

It may be apparent to some that this blog suffered a short hiatus on my part since my last post. To some extent, that was because I found myself very busy chasing deadlines after my return from the Natural Hazards Workshop in Colorado on July 14, a day later than anticipated because of a flight cancellation due to storms in Chicago. I was then squeezed for time, with just six work days left until taking a vacation this week, with two of those largely devoted to participating in a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency symposium on urban sustainability. Nonetheless, by last Friday, I managed with some extra effort to clear the most urgent action items from my desk in preparation for a week off.

Then it hit. Maybe I was more vulnerable because of the time pressures, or maybe it was just something that caught up with me. There is no way to know, but my neck grew tight, and by the time I got home, fever and chills set in and my wife insisted on taking me to the emergency room. After three hours of tests and x-rays, strep and tonsillitis and similar problems were ruled out, but it was clear my right-side lymph nodes were inflamed and some sort of infection had taken residence inside my throat. The doctor gave me antibiotics, which I am taking for ten days, and they seem to be effective. But the illness certainly ruined an evening in which I was going to get a haircut and shop for groceries for an outdoor barbecue party in our backyard for my wife’s birthday on Sunday. I was pretty useless on Saturday, worn down and unable to swallow or talk without considerable effort, although I did help shop for groceries, including a birthday cake. I was not good for much more, and I was growing hungry because eating was such a chore.

That remained the case for much of Sunday, though I was energetic enough by then to join the party. I did not have nearly enough energy to play grillmaster in the hot sun, so someone else took over who enjoyed the job, fortunately. But all I could eat and swallow was watermelon and some cake and ice cream, none of which excessively challenged those inflamed lymph nodes.

Why share all this? My illness will pass, but when I watched Anastasia Somoza, a quadriplegic who also suffers from cerebral palsy, discuss attitudes toward disability on stage Monday evening, it reminded me of a thought I have had before. What if the condition I was suffering temporarily were something I had to live with permanently? How would I want to be treated? How would it make me feel, and how would it affect my outlook on life? Admittedly, a viral or bacterial infection generally does not leave lasting impacts, but there are other ways all of us can at least project ourselves into such situations to begin to understand how it feels to be the perennial underdog in life.

This thought actually first occurred to me more than 15 years ago, when I suffered a debilitating herniated disk in my lower back as a result of lifting a box of books the wrong way after having our house repainted. The pain was immediate and agonizing. I had to grab the rails to ascend and descend the stairs in our three-story house. Although I never needed surgery, and I am very glad because back surgery is generally brutal and barbaric (my father underwent it in 1968), I did undergo three months of strenuous rehabilitation therapy that required the discipline on my part to do sets of exercises three times daily between therapy sessions. I was determined not to suffer permanent impacts from the injury and followed the routine to the letter, ultimately achieving release from therapy two weeks early. There is a great deal to be said for willpower, and there is nothing wrong with having the pride in one’s willpower to struggle through such a situation successfully, as I did. I soon resumed jogging, and the experience is certainly a factor in my ongoing effort to remain physically fit.

But there is a great deal wrong with thinking we are better than anyone else because of such success. There is a great deal right with using such examples to encourage others faced with similar circumstances. The one thought that stuck with me afterwards was, What if I had not been able to recover successfully? What if I had suffered a permanent injury, like many veterans or just those born with serious physical limitations over which they never had any control? I know how humbling it was even for those three months to be unable to sleep in comfort, to be wary of being bumped by anyone in close quarters, and the challenge of climbing stairs. It does not seem so hard to me to be able to extrapolate that sort of experience into some empathy for those who may never be able to function as fully as the rest of us.

So, as you listen to this whole discussion about disability rights and how we treat each other, remember that this ought not to be a partisan matter. It was a Democratic U.S. Senator from Iowa, Tom Harkin, one of my personal heroes, who introduced and fought for the Americans with Disabilities Act, and it was a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, who signed it. Harkin was motivated in part by the experience of his younger brother, Frank, who was deaf. Disabilities cross party lines and so should our empathy and understanding of what it takes to include and respect all those who face challenges. By now this should be as settled an issue as universal suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Let’s be human, folks. In this particular instance, it does not take much to imagine ourselves in someone else’s wheelchair. Just think of the extraordinary exertions on behalf of others of one of our famous past presidents—Franklin D. Roosevelt. Enough said.

 

Jim Schwab

It’s Okay to Fail (Sometimes)

Ascension Parish Strike SceneJust in case anyone out there is unduly impressed with my intelligence, I have a revelation: I flunked calculus in my first quarter of my freshman year in college. I was attending Cleveland State University on Kiwanis scholarship money, no less. Not that I really understood what hit me or saw it coming, and that’s the point. I entered with high SAT scores, and the guidance counselor duly noted that I had high placement scores for both Spanish and Mathematics. She recommended a fifth-quarter placement for Spanish though my three years in high school ordinarily equated to fourth-quarter placement. We ended up choosing more conservatively, and I aced both the fourth and fifth quarters of Spanish to complete my language requirement. I probably should have skipped that fourth quarter and taken the advanced placement. On the other hand, we stuck with the advanced placement in calculus, and it backfired. Not so good.

A little background is helpful, as it almost always is in understanding how and why any student performs at the college level. I entered the fall quarter on crutches because of an industrial accident late in the summer. I was earning money working in a chemical plant in a nearby Cleveland suburb, but the dome of an antimony kiln tipped over and trapped my ankle, which was fractured. I collected worker compensation for the next six weeks until the doctor removed the cast, at which time I hobbled for a while until I rebuilt strength in my left leg. That was certainly a distraction, but not a dire impediment. More importantly, but exacerbated by the injury, I had a tendency developed earlier in life not to reach out for help when I needed it, in part because of a stubborn tendency to assume I could figure things out, which I very often had done. I was in deep water in that calculus class, and by the time I realized I could not swim, I was drowning—even though the ankle had healed just fine.

In a subsequent quarter, I asserted some hard-working grit by getting permission to take 20 credits (the limit was 18), five courses instead of four, in order to regain the lost ground from that failed class. And I pushed my through that grinding schedule with respectable grades.

Failing that class, which may have cost me a renewal of the scholarship (I never found out), may have been vital, however, for my growth as a student. I worked two more summers in that chemical plant, which would only qualify as easy work if you enjoy such activities as unloading 50-pound bags of sulfur on a dolly from a railcar in 95-degree heat while wearing a face mask. I should note that my father worked there, too. He ran the garage and was the lead mechanic, repairing and maintaining all the trucks and forklifts and such. When I started college, he too was temporarily disabled. He was in the hospital with a disk injury that required lower back surgery that kept him out of work for six months. Suffice it to say that all the undergraduate tuition for my education came from my own savings from those summer and other seasonal jobs. Thank God for union wages. But it did mean that my education was for me a valuable commodity, hard earned and well paid for. Although I attended college from 1968 to 1973, in the midst of the civil rights, Vietnam war, and environmental protest era, and I did participate in all those causes, I was decidedly not inclined to get silly about drugs, sex, and parties because it was my money that was paying for that education. It makes a difference.

There is a certain right-wing mythology in American politics that says such self-reliance induces a conservative outlook in life. What it does, which has little to do with modern American conservatism in my opinion, is instill a strong dose of resilience and common sense. That may or may not lead to a conservative political outlook. In my case, it led to a strong identification with those struggling to get ahead and a willingness to balance the social scales better than we typically do. My intellectual curiosity drove me to learn more about other cultures and lifestyles and perspectives.

I should also add that I had a powerful hankering to write, one that has asserted itself repeatedly throughout my life and career. It seemed at first that majoring in English made sense; the university did not offer a major in journalism. I enjoyed reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald and 17th-century English novelists for a while, and the honors English classes in which I was placed were stimulating. But I soon realized that another part of me was itching to be born. In high school, perhaps in part because of nerdy tendencies, such as they came in the 1960s, I was somewhat withdrawn. Our high school was a high performer, and I was on an academic quiz show team, but no matter. I never felt that I fit in very easily, but I was president of the Writers Club and active in one or two other groups—but nothing major.

At Cleveland State, however, I quickly found that my inner extrovert was eagerly waiting to burst its shell, and the higher intellectual climate was just what I needed to find my comfort zone. I started doing less well in those honors English classes as I became heavily involved in campus politics, at one point running credibly but unsuccessfully for president of the student government. I founded Cleveland State’s first student environmental group and led it for three years. It was time to blend my academic studies with my real life aspirations, and I shifted my major to political science, which undoubtedly aided my GPA. Suddenly my activities and my studies bore some relation to each other. I could excel again.

None of this led to instant change. It led to perpetual evolution. It took years for many of the seeds planted in those college years to grow and mature, and failure contributed to that growth and maturation every bit as much as any success along the way. Someday I may need a whole book to relate the entire story, and right now I lack the free time to write it thoughtfully and thoroughly. But in all the discussion of resilient communities of which I am a part, I am at least willing to offer that, beneath all the intellectual definitions of resilience, some of us also harbor perspectives on resilience that are built on a solid foundation of personal experience. And in real life, those perspectives matter every bit as much in collectively defining resilience as any words in a dictionary or scientific report.

 

Jim Schwab