Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Empathy, Sympathy, and a Moment for Grace…Even For Alec Baldwin
Alec Baldwin is not a good man.
We can go through his long personal, political, and professional history and document all the ways in which Baldwin has acted in disgusting, horrible fashions. It would take about 50 seconds on Google to come up with enough information to write a 2,000-word piece on the subject.
But this moment is not about Alec Baldwin.
In a horrible incident in New Mexico, on the set of the movie “Rust”, Baldwin apparently fired a prop gun, and some kind of projectile of unknown type was ejected, with horrible consequences: Director of photography Halyna Hutchins, 42, was transported to the hospital via helicopter and pronounced dead by medical personnel at University of New Mexico Hospital, according to the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.
Director Joel Souza, 48, was transported to Christus St. Vincent’s Regional Medical Center by ambulance for care. Details on his condition were not released.
The scope of the tragedy is hard to comprehend for the Hollywood community. Hutchins was a well-known cinematographer, and the grieving throughout the industry was seen all over social media. Souza is expected to make a full recovery, and is lucky not to have been more seriously injured.
Baldwin expressed his shock and sadness regarding the tragic events on social media. “There are no words to convey my shock and sadness regarding the tragic accident that took the life of Halyna Hutchins, a wife, mother, and deeply admired colleague of ours.”
As those closest involved with the incident deal with the repercussions of this tragedy, the public spectacle is one we are all familiar with. Those that despise Baldwin have often been almost gleeful at what has befallen him. Others are simply using the moment to point out the many times Baldwin has failed to show sympathy or empathy to those he dislikes, most famously former Vice President Dick Cheney. Baldwin famously ridiculed Cheney after the Vice President accidentally shot and wounded a friend on a hunting trip (the man survived with minor injuries).
None of this speaks well of civil society in America today. These are the moments that define what type of nation we want to have, and want to aspire to. Our nation remains engulfed in a divisive culture war, with all sides treating Americans they view as the enemy as a ‘foreign’ force that must be politically destroyed and excluded from public life.
Baldwin is clearly not a sympathetic character in this regard. Few have done more to worsen our civil discourse. He has had long-running feuds with numerous conservatives, and his despise for former Presidents Donald Trump and George W. Bush is public and well known.
This is however when the concept of empathy, sympathy, and grace become most important. When things are well, and people are content, it is far easier to express sympathy to those we not only dislike, but fail to understand. But in times like these, when we are polarized and divided, it becomes extremely difficult to rise above the rancor and anger.
I’ve written about the concepts of empathy and sympathy many times, and especially in regards to our failure to promote these concepts for the greater good of civility in American society. Here is an excerpt from 2018:
When someone tries to display sympathy for another person’s hardships and anguish, it is simply an acknowledgment that we understand what that person is going through, and we simply hope for their quick recovery. In traditional society, the quickest and most common way to demonstrate that heartfelt belief was to send prayers to those that were suffering. Sharing sympathetic thoughts is one significant way in which we experience a greater sense of shared similarities together, and allows for a more profound personal engagement than one would generally have with people under normal situations.
Empathy, on the other hand, is the ability to put one’s self into the shoes of another, and to truly understand their point of view. It allows us to come to terms with how others came to make the decision they chose to make, without allowing our own biases to cloud that judgment. So the uniqueness of empathy is that, unlike sympathy, it allows for people to join together and at least attempt to have a shared experience. First and foremost, it involves seeing someone else’s situation from their perspective, and second, sharing their emotions, including their distress.
Most of us cannot truly understand the grief that Halyna Hutchins’ family is going through, nor can we comprehend that devastation and despair that Alec Baldwin is feeling. But we can attempt to be empathetic in trying to understand the devastation caused by this tragic incident.
Baldwin may not be a generous or open-hearted person to those he politically disagrees with, but he is a human with human emotions. And this is a moment in which our common humanity should rise above the anger, rhetoric, and divisiveness that Baldwin, and many of us, have contributed to over the years.
And this is why the concept of grace is so critical to a civil society. Grace, ultimately, is the generous, free and totally unexpected and undeserved understanding of one to another. It is a concept unencumbered by the concept of just deserts, which demands we take ‘an eye for an eye’ as a just punishment for prior injustices.
Grace requires that our sympathetic, empathetic and graceful nature rise above the bad behavior of others. Baldwin probably is undeserving of our empathy. He failed to be graceful when his enemies were in a similar position. But grace requires us to elevate our spirit above and beyond what we would expect of others. Grace requires us to do what we believe is right, even if those we bestow that gift on would not do the same for us.
This is a sacrifice for many of us. It is easy to be mean-spirited and spiteful to those that have behaved that way toward us. Ultimately, however, such a society only damages us all. The true spirit of a truly peaceful and accepting society is one where we forgive, and try to rise above the anger and rancor. And only by acting in this manner can we hope to become a more civil society.
Published in Culture
Yes, I know. That’s what the “Let the investigation play out” part was about. Sure, maybe it was murder. But it seems much more likely to me that it was negligence. In any case, that’s what I’ll assume until evidence suggests otherwise.
Notice the passive voice that is used in all the articles I’ve read. “The gun went off.”
Like all those buildings that “caught fire” last year.
Almost every gun scene in every movie or TV show you’ve ever seen uses a real gun. Except for the phasers in Star Trek. Hexum died because he didn’t know that a blank still produces a powerful blast. So far as we know so far, the gun in Rust was supposed to fire blanks but someone put a real bullet in it.
As best I can recall, the starter pistols for track meets have solid barrels. A bullet can’t pass through.
Yes. But movies are made to be entertaining, and there simply isn’t a big market for guns that look and function like real guns but have plugged barrels. So movies use real guns. Even science fiction movies often use real guns with extra parts bolted on to make them look futuristic.
Harrison Ford’s gun in the Star Wars movies was a tricked out C96 “Broomhandle” Mauser, invented well over a century ago and one of the first really successful semi-automatic handguns. (I had the pleasure of shooting one in an unused wine cellar beneath a factory in Nancy, France while on a business trip about thirty years ago. Though it was no longer used as a wine cellar, we had plenty of wine with us that night, and an unholy number of firearms. The evening is in my personal top five list of unsafe life moments… but not my top three.)
But that would likely be noticeable in a TV show or movie.
One thing I’ve heard is that when the gun was used in a previous scene, for some reason it had to have real-looking bullets in it, but they use bullets with no powder in them. Somehow, a part of the slug or something else was still in the barrel when the real-looking bullets were replaced with blanks for a later scene, and when the blank was fired, the part came out as you’d expect.
True–but in 120 years of American filmmaking, we’ve used real guns, because unlike most other countries, we have audiences that are familiar with the look of the real thing.
Lots of gang shootings in Albu. They know how to treat gunshot wounds.
Correct!
Perhaps he thought it was a taser.
Yeah. Albuquerque was once-upon-a-time my hometown. Sitting at the crossroads of the two great American highways, I-25 and Route 66, and so close to our southern border, makes it a high-traffic spot for a certain disreputable kind of traveler.
Looking forward to the future. I expect that the next time Baldwin appears on a red carpet, the press will celebrate the “courage” he displayed enduring the event and its aftermath.
No. There are 4 basic rules of firearm safety.
The fault is always with the person whose finger is on the trigger. I looked every where and there is no “Actor Exception” to the above rules.
And it will make him an expert on any other gun incidents in the press.
Except in movies/TVs they can’t always point the weapon in a safe direction, because that would mean not appearing to shoot whoever they’re pretending to shoot.
And yet there must be such an exception. Common sense and practicality dictate it.
On production sets, rules one and two must be modified: (1) have every gun checked for safety before it is used in a scene; and (2) point it only where you’re supposed to point it (which may include toward other people).
Rules three and four can stand, although it may be appropriate in some instances to relax rule four if the actor is not supposed to have a clue how to handle a gun.
Seriously?
All they have to do is open the chamber and check – takes seconds. Do it before every take. This isn’t rocket science.
Everyone needs a refresher now and then.
And Democrat members of Congress will fall over themselves to bring him to DC to testify on behalf of some proposed screwy gun-control legislation.
Who knows, I might be in favor of banning actors from owning guns.
As @dougwatt describes in his Prop Guns and Blanks post, there are failure modes that aren’t quite so obvious as “there’s a live cartridge in the chamber.” A bullet lodged part way up the barrel, for example, wouldn’t be obvious unless someone managed to actually check the barrel for obstruction — something awkward, time-consuming, and potentially unsafe to do.
Years ago I inherited an old lever-action .30-30 rifle. It had been owned by someone unfamiliar with firearms, and fired only once or twice. I received it, looked it over, and put it away. (I’m more a handgun shooter.) A few years later I took it down and worked the lever, considering taking it out to the range. Imagine my surprise when, after cycling the action a few times, working the lever caused a live round to be ejected.
What I hadn’t realized was that there was a live round wedged up in the feed tube. It had never occurred to me to check for that — not sure how I’d even do it, really. The fellow who owned it before me had somehow managed to get all but one round out, perhaps by repeatedly cycling it, and not realized that the spring had failed to push the last round down far enough to be visible.
Accidents happen. Sometimes the cause isn’t obvious.
Ah, but there isn’t.
From the primer on page 2 – obviously talking about a gun loaded with dummy rounds and just as obviously involving the actor himself. Rule 1 clearing the weapon.
Rule 2 in this case is to only point the weapon where you need to for the scene – not willy nilly.
I agree with the Col on this.
That doesn’t mean they can’t immediately check the weapon themselves.
Hmmm. I always look in the feed mechanism when I am “cycling” the action in preparation to take a firearm somewhere.
Had you done that you would have caught it before it was loaded.
Which is what I said: “point it where you’re supposed to point it (which may include toward other people).”
It follows from that we must relax Rule 1, since we would otherwise never point a loaded gun at anyone we weren’t willing to kill.
So, just as movies require a suspension of disbelief, so to do they require a suspension of various rules (of driving, gun handling, etc.) by which normal people live in the real world.
Oh, I had looked into the feed mechanism. I just hadn’t looked half way up the feed tube. I’m not sure how to do that in a gun with a spring-loaded side port through which rounds are inserted into the feed tube. There is no straight view up the feed tube unless the gun is disassembled. If I had realized that a tiny tip of the feed spring was visible at full extension, and had noticed its absence, I’d probably have disassembled the gun (which I subsequently did). But I didn’t.
In any case, because I don’t point guns at people I don’t plan to shoot (and, to date, that hasn’t happened), and since I treat guns as if they’re always loaded, no harm came of it. Firearm safety involves a lot of redundancy.
Then don’t put guns in their hands! This isn’t rocket science, and only one idiot pulled the trigger.
That’s why the four rules are always in effect, not three, not two.
This is a very thoughtful take on what we’ve been seeing everywhere [and unfortunately in the comment section here on ricochet].
But not always. Not when suspended for a good reason, such as on a film set.
Gun safety isn’t religion.
Right. It’s science.