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Empathic Justice vs Social Justice: Where we may have Jumped the Shark [1]

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Date: 2025-07-12

I will begin this hopefully provocative piece by giving some demographic data about me, so I can frame this appropriately.

White in the American mutt way (nobodies in Europe crossed the seas to be nobodies in America in the late 1800s)

Poor to Middle Class back to Poor (I had some success as a machinist and manager, but never more than a dead center middle class)

Food Stamp and HUD household growing up in the 80s

Child of Divorce which was less common at the time

High School dropout (I still agree with Paul Simon in Kodachrome)

Scammed by Devry for a semester of college when newly married with kid (knocked up girlfriend, hardly original story)

Trade school lead to first real career in early 30s

Now here is the unique one. At 48 I am dying of heart failure. They keep cutting me up, but I just keep dying. It is a shitty hand that I try to be accepting of, but my kin, I tell you it takes everything not to scream at the sky for the unfairness of the thing.

What does this have to do with privilege? (Enter a young CNA in nursing school)

I got onto politics with a young nurse who was treating me. She was fantastic at the care she provided, and I’m sure she will go on to help many people in a very meaningful life. She is a good person. She is also a terrible advertisement for the left.

Medical procedures involve waiting, a lot. You end up talking to your providers in the hospital or while waiting for a doctor to check imaging. As a patient disabuse yourself of the customer / seller relationship. You and the healthcare system are trying clumsily to keep your parts running, and all the other stuff is window dressing.

She began discussing Gaza, for which I agreed with almost every statement, however, she was clearly fuzzy on the history or Jewish perspective. She attributed qualities to Jews in Israel that simply are wrong. She had most of the facts right, but the way she described the intentions of the Jews was disturbingly unempathetic.

I don’t make it a point to argue with people, who are well-intentioned, because they need some time to sort out a whole lot of history as an American. Complexity requires wisdom, which is a long road to walk.

But she began triggering me in a way I have never experienced. She began talking about the healthcare system and the inequities there in. She said I was lucky to be a straight white man, as the outcomes for others was much worse. Flag on the play

For anyone confused about my reaction, I would like you to remember a fact. I am 48 year old and dying. It isn’t a competition, but I’m not sure how she got from the vitals in front of her to my overwhelming privilege, but it was incredibly hurtful. If you can’t understand why, I don’t know what to tell you, other than this is the problem with a purely collective view of social justice without empathy for the life right in front of you.

How do we get her to see me as a human being experiencing an essential and universal experience instead of a strawman in her constructed world view?

Is there a gap between social justice and justice as a human reality?

I only know that if I did not extend empathy to her, I would view her ideology as lacking any humanistic grounding. If I were Jewish, which she had no way of knowing, I would think she had grown up in a Klan household, based on her views of Jewish sneakiness and deception. Please help me see what I can’t.

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