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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
Jon-Erik Hexum
addendum- I later saw someone else answered this…
You expressed surprise when “working the lever caused a live round to be ejected”.
I was pointing out that, had you been looking in the breech while “working the lever” you would have seen the round before it was inserted into the barrel and thus would not have been surprised when the round was ejected.
And has been enshrined into case law.
Heh. It’s a set of guidelines. And they have to vary, depending on the context. Lots of apparently irresponsible behavior occurs in movies, mostly involving guns, cars, and women, none of which should be attempted at home.
That’s a fallacy. Camera angles lie.
How many times have you watched a sporting event and watched 6 replays of the same play only to find out only one of them shows what really happened? You don’t actually have to point the weapon at another human.
Lenses can be used to distort reality as well. My favorite shot is the hero walking away while something explodes behind him. In reality, if they were as close as the lense makes them appear, they would be blown forward and the concussive force would kill them.
Tell me another story.
Dana Loesch disagrees with you.
Just like science!
See: Stress Diagram of a Strapless Evening Gown, which I suspect you have close at hand.
The book, not the gown.
I prefer Man Of Steel, Woman Of Kleenex.
I am completely okay with Ms. Loesch disagreeing with me.
You never see him actually pull the trigger. That’s the Psycho effect, so named after the fact that in the infamous Hitchcock shower scene at no time do you see the knife meet flesh. Cut, cut, cut. The gun in Connery’s hand could be plugged, but at no time do you see the end of the barrel. The “victim” has his back to the camera. No sign of a muzzle flash, no smoke.
Not the point. Putting a gun into someone’s mouth appears to violate at least one of the carved-in-stone-tablets rules being promulgated by the no-exceptions-ever people. Even if we never see the trigger pulled. It’s sure as hell POINTING A GUN AT SOMEONE, to start with. Which apparently is never to be done even if 50 people checked to make sure the gun is unloaded.
No, it’s exactly the point. You can’t prove that was a real gun.
It looked just like either soap or licorice to me. But it might have been real.
And you wasted the rest of your money?
Figures. I love Niven, but that is not one of his prouder moments.
I love Niven, too, and I’ve read most of his books several times. I don’t recognize the phrase.
“Guns, cars, and women”…the subjects of every ’70s Blaxploitation movie.
Every movie worth a damn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_of_Steel,_Woman_of_Kleenex
From the article:
Text here:
http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html
More explanation doesn’t make this better. Unlike Stress Diagram ~
Eh. I prefer the whatever it was, college student thesis about how many souls can fit in Hell or whatever it was.
Whatever, Entropy. You are the Heat Death of topics.
You wanted to chat more about the stress diagram of a strapless dress? I’m sure someone is interested, just not me.
I think I actually read that, but it has been 50 years.
He’s been merciless in the past on people who shot someone.
Well for one thing, Baldwin would say his shooting was “accidental” not “wrongful.”
Maybe this will be an opportunity for Alec Baldwin to learn some humility. Maybe even Alec Baldwin will see the worth in the values promoted in the OP. But even if Baldwin doesn’t, it doesn’t mean Mr. Shanker is wrong.
If you have a gun in your hand, you have the responsibility to know – not guess, not surmise, not accept the testimony of an expert, but to personally know – the status of that weapon. It is negligence not to.
Sure. That makes sense. Up to a point.
But does that mean he has to check the cartridge loaded, to make sure that the realistic dummy round doesn’t still contain a primer? Does that mean he has to check the barrel to make sure that there’s no bit of debris lodged in it that will become a dangerous projectile?