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
A dummy round? Dummy rounds are inert. There’s no point to them other than to learn how to load the gun, and not much point to them even then. If the person who is going to be handling the gun is going to be firing blanks, then yes, he absolutely needs to be able to identify what blank rounds look like.
I note that while a dozen members were quick to repeatedly condemn Alec Baldwin, this post had 40 “likes.” I suggest that the dozen objectors should not out weigh the 40 members who “liked” this post.
Dummy rounds are supposed to be inert. But if you remove the powder charge but fail to remove the primer, you end up with a defective dummy round. Does it look like a real dummy round? I don’t know; probably. That would depend on whether real dummy rounds have fake primers in their base. If they do — and, again, I don’t know — then I don’t know how one would know, looking at what is supposed to be a proper dummy round, whether or not it was a real, properly non-functional dummy round. You’d probably have to take it apart… or trust that the on-set armorer knew what he or she was doing.
Of course, a defective dummy round containing only a primer would be unlikely to kill someone; it might not even push the projectile through the end of the barrel. It might just lodge it half way up, where a real primer would later cause it to become a dangerous bit of debris. That’s something else that the actor would presumably have to check.
Grace for Kim Potter, also?
Serious.
I’d lean that way, based on what little I know of her case.
But, as I said when it first happens, I’d retire her from policing.
She’s being charged with first-degree manslaughter. By Keith Ellison.
I would expect nothing less, knowing what little I know of Keith Ellison. The man strikes me as a walking miscarriage of justice.
I think my position is that yes I have empathy for Baldwin for the tragic mistake but he is still culpable for negligence. I don’t see the two as mutually exclusive.
I am forced to draw a distinction between the treatment of Chauvin (not your namesake, the new one) and Baldwin. Chauvin’s sacrifice had nothing to do with the rule of law. It was an Aztecean psychological cutting out of the heart, and I would not like to see such sacrifices used in turn on our political opponents; whereas Baldwin actually did kill someone through negligence or callous disregard for safety in what many would view as unprofessional and dangerous practices.
If I were king, I would punish Baldwin with making him always tell the truth regarding guns and gun usage, and every time he made a false statement he would lose a digit from all further professional salaries and payments; and a $10,000,000 deal only starts with eight digits, so after the tenth misstatement he only makes a penny per contract.
I think that would hurt him far more than any prison sentence. You may disagree.
Or maybe just a real digit.
If we could only get Keith Ellison to do the investigation it would be a moment for grace.
Actually I screwed up. I thought Kim Potter was the armorer on the Rust set. Scratch that thought. I’ll go delete my comment.
He may like it.
I tried to avoid that meaning (not really).
That’s what I thought at first.
I would say so. The one doesn’t make sense, and the other is something I do when I clear a weapon. Dad taught me the thumbnail trick.
I am not familiar with this type of dummy round except in Naval guns. And for small arms, I don’t think the primer is a realistic hazard. I don’t know.
I’m interested.
Is she the idiot cop who blew away a dude with her “taser”?
IMHO that’s also manslaughter 1. Same as I see it for Baldwin.
Well, at least some of the incidents that have occurred were not directly from the primer itself, but from what resulted from a previous primer.
That could certainly be a justified charge, but the cop was acting alone. Baldwin has others he can shift blame to.
AFTER you have removed the magazine (or rotated the cylinder away),
AFTER you have cleared the chamber (or chambers),
AFTER locking the action open,
AFTER you put your thumb into the action so that your thumbnail reflects light up into the barrel,
and AFTER accepting that if anything gives way or fails, you are just going to take a bruise to your thumb,
THEN you look through the barrel from the muzzle end.
I do this every time I clear a weapon, and any time I plan to fire one, given the right conditions (not urgent etc).
I confess that I can never remember how on-spec functional checks are supposed to go, but I get close.
The military frowns on this end-on inspection unless the weapon is disassembled. I understand why. But this is my habit.
You can get dummy rounds for most any kind of pistol information for less than $2 each. Who is going to manufacture their own by removing the primer when they’re that cheap?
I hope not. These should be additional, independent responsibilities, rather than a division of shared responsibility. But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.
I’ve got one of those fiber optic instruments to examine the bore with.
I’ll always have a thumbnail with me. Works for every caliber.
I’ve heard this can be a problem in low powder sub-sonic rounds.
That thumbnail approach sounds sensible. I have to admit that, in all my years of shooting, I’ve never made a habit of checking the barrel. Perhaps I will in future.
So what do you do with an old period piece revolver, say an early Colt, with a fixed cylinder and a side loading gate, where you can’t swing the cylinder out to get your thumb behind the barrel?