Empathy Should not be Conditional

On August 9, 2018, 40 Yemeni school children were killed in a devastating Saudi-led coalition airstrike. The bomb that struck their school bus was produced in the United States, and sold to the Saudi Arabians with authorization from the US government. This is what happens when empathy becomes conditional. 

This latest tragedy was not the first case of US armaments being used on Yemeni civilians. In October 2016 the bombing of a funeral home in Yemen, killing 155 people, led the Obama administration to ban the sale of precision-guided weapons to the Saudi Arabians. The ban was overturned in 2017 by Rex Tillerson of the Trump administration.  

The situation in Yemen is a humanitarian disaster, with the war rendering much of the population unable to access clean water or proper healthcare. Why then, is the United States fueling the war? The simple answer is jobs. The bomb used to kill 40 children was produced by US workers working for Lockheed Martin. The 2016 bombing of the funeral home was conducted with munitions produced by Raytheon. All the weapons sold to Saudi Arabia by the United States require labor, which means more jobs and a stronger economy. We are essentially prioritizing jobs in the United States over civilian lives in Yemen. The United Kingdom and Spain, two more suppliers of weapons to Saudi Arabia are both making similar prioritizations.  

The reasoning can be traced to a disparity between the public empathy for workers in the United States and civilians in Yemen. We’re conditioned to have empathy for Americans, but across borders that empathy deteriorates into apathy. Even within the United States empathy has become contingent on a number of qualifying factors including race, socioeconomic status and gender.  

Conditional empathy is what allowed us to perpetuate slavery, the most despicable institution in US history, and what today allows us to perpetuate its modern extension: mass incarceration.  

The prison strike that started August 21 of this year highlights many of the ways in which the incarcerated population (which is proportionally larger in the United States than any other country in the world) is mistreated and shown a lower standard of empathy. Inmates in the US are forced to work prison labor for well below the minimum wage and often not given proper access to medical care. Nebraska’s prisons are currently at roughly 160 percent of their designed capacity, leading to riots and safety issues for inmates. When these issues are brought up, however, they rarely gain traction in public discussion. They are, after all, convicted criminals, why should they be afforded rights? This kind of rhetoric serves to dehumanize its subject, thereby making it easier to cast away any empathy that might otherwise have been afforded. A conviction does not strip a person of their humanity, and it should therefore not disqualify them from being treated with empathy.  

This same kind of dehumanizing rhetoric has been used by the Trump administration to justify the locking of migrant children in cages. By repeatedly distinguishing between “Americans” and immigrants, Trump has created yet another qualifier for empathy. 

Societal progress has always been driven by the extension of public empathy, and the limitation of empathy has preceded all of history’s greatest man-made tragedies. In order to ensure a more humane world we must accept that empathy can never be contingent — that all people must be afforded basic human empathy unconditionally.