“Careless, Callous, and Cruel”

 

            A little over 100 days into this regime, my head aches and heart breaks to understand the agenda embraced by the people I know. I spent weeks diving into The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. Although published in 2012, this provocative synthesis should be on everyone’s reading list. I find myself going back to its pages as I desperately try to understand why the good people I count as family and friends have moved so easily into being careless, callous, and cruel.
            Then I remember that many of them showed levels of thoughtlessness and insensitivity whenever life required them to think from another person’s point of view. Why should they consider the needs of anyone that didn’t fit into the cultish family traditions? Why should they change anything in their routines and rights? Why should they step outside of their protected, cultivated, restrictive communities to engage in a wider worldview? Any suggestions that their telescoped opinions could be inaccurate met with ostracism. “US verses THEM”, their family moto, primed them to embrace political leaders ready to hijack them, even if they get hurt.
            When confronted with the tenants of Project 2025, they wrap themselves in their protective layers of privilege, knowing their misogynistic purity protects them and their lockstep families. They defend that they care—for their immediate family, as it should be. No one else matters. Even family can be shoved aside if there’s even a hint of “free riding” scenting the air. Homelessness and suicide for adult children who don’t show proper loyalty and subservience becomes an honorable badge to sanctify their callousness.
            I shouldn’t be shocked that these same people easily accept the ruthlessness this regime embraces. These people adorn their walls with trophies and their homes and bodies with gaudy displays of wealth. One of them is the woman I no longer talk to because she defended slavery, saying that she read somewhere that not all slave owners were cruel. She refused to understand that owning another person is cruel. Period.
            What kind of suffering can these people justify? Will there be an action or order that will wake them up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat?  Can they walk away from this careless, callous and cruel path? Do they want to?

 

Copyright 2025 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman