The Permission to be Cruel

Cruelty is the point

The Permission to Be Cruel

I just finished an early-morning consultation about my neuropathic pain at UCHealth here in Colorado. I am sitting in the parking lot now, thinking about getting back to the house, grabbing Willow and finally making my way to the dog park, where the simple act of watching her run has a way of putting the world back into some kind of perspective. This may have been my hundredth consultation, for all I know, another conversation about another MRI, another procedure and the possibility that a surgical solution, what would be my tenth surgery in twenty years, might somehow mitigate the pain and progressive weakness that have become such relentless companions. After thirty-five years of chronic neuropathic pain, the surgical options may be nearly exhausted. More testing needs to be done before anyone can determine whether another operation would genuinely help or merely put my body through one more traumatic intervention without giving me the relief I seek. Still, everything happens for a reason, and sometimes the most illuminating part of a hospital visit is not the test being ordered or the procedure being discussed, but the intimate human conversation that takes place in the room.

As I spoke with Michele, the neurosurgery physician assistant, I found myself thinking about the doctors, nurses and medical professionals who spend their lives meeting frightened, exhausted and hurting people at their most vulnerable. Michele did not have a magic answer for me. She could not promise that another surgery would restore the strength in my leg or quiet the electric storm that has traveled through my body for more than three decades. What she offered was honesty, attention, empathy and compassion, the willingness to listen carefully and treat my pain as real because I am a human being sitting in front of her. Those qualities should not feel remarkable, but at this moment in America they do, because they could not be further removed from what I see in Donald Trump and his craven administration. Sitting in that parking lot after speaking with someone whose work is grounded in alleviating suffering, I realized again that, above all else, it is the cruelty of Trump and the cultlike movement surrounding him that bothers me most.

I have tried to put my mind into the headspace of a MAGA worshipper. I have tried saying the words to myself: They deserve to rot in cages because they crossed an imaginary line in the dirt. Whatever happens to them in detention is well deserved. That so-called terrorist mayor in New York City should be denaturalized and deported. Democrats hate America. LGBTQ people have no rights. Disabled reporters deserve mockery. Women who are not Donald Trump’s type deserve ridicule. I have tried to imagine looking at another human being and feeling satisfaction at their humiliation, terror or pain. No matter how hard I try, I cannot get my brain into that headspace. I cannot twist my conscience into that grotesque shape, and I cannot understand how so many Americans have managed not only to enter that moral wasteland, but to build a home there, plant a flag in it and call it patriotism.

It boggles my mind and deeply raises the hackles of consciousness within me that this many people can witness such inhumanity and decide that it is acceptable. They see frightened families torn apart, human beings packed into detention facilities, women publicly demeaned, disabled people mocked and entire communities treated as if their dignity were conditional, and they call it strength. They have learned to interpret compassion as weakness, humiliation as leadership and brutality as law and order. This is no longer an ordinary disagreement over taxes, spending or the proper reach of government. It is a moral catastrophe, because political differences are being used as permission to stop seeing other people as human beings. Once that permission is granted, cruelty is no longer an unfortunate consequence of policy. Cruelty becomes the policy, the spectacle and, for far too many people, the reward.

Cruelty is not new, of course. History is filled with it. Bullying, racism, greed, misogyny, homophobia and hatred have always existed, including throughout the American story we too often romanticize. What feels different now is not the presence of cruelty but its permission. The guardrails that once at least nudged public life toward decency have been stripped away and replaced with applause for humiliation and admiration for domination. People now say the ugliest things imaginable with the smug confidence that they are not only entitled to their contempt but somehow heroic for expressing it. Trump did not invent the darkness inside these people. He gave it a microphone, a red hat, a political movement and presidential permission.

Trump has made cruelty fashionable. He has taught his followers that empathy is practiced by suckers, that an apology is an admission of weakness and that every human interaction must produce a winner and a loser. He converted grievance into an identity, resentment into a movement and vengeance into a governing philosophy. He gave millions of Americans permission to stop pretending they cared about anyone outside their tribe. The poison was already in the bloodstream; Trump simply taught the body politic to stop fighting it. His administration reflects that same moral vacancy because its members understand that punishment is not merely a means to an end. It is a performance staged for people who want to see someone weaker, poorer, darker, foreign, female, disabled or politically disfavored made to suffer.

As bad a president as I knew Trump would be in 2016, his ineptness and moral turpitude have far exceeded even my most dire expectations. We all understood who he was back then, didn’t we? We watched him mock a disabled reporter, an act that became personal for me as a disabled American because I recognized immediately what kind of man uses another person’s physical condition as entertainment. We heard the way he spoke about women. We saw the pathological lying, malignant narcissism, racial grievance, lechery, cruelty and bottomless appetite for attention. None of it was hidden. There was no disguise to penetrate and no complicated mystery to solve. The man announced himself plainly, repeatedly and proudly, and millions of Americans looked directly into that moral sewer and decided it was exactly what they wanted.

I am so tired of him, truly, profoundly and bone-deep tired. I am tired of people pretending he is not a hateful, lecherous, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, nepotistic, rapacious, compulsively lying, lifelong career conman. I am tired of his lies, but I am even more tired of the people who choose to believe them because the lies grant them permission to hate the people they already wanted to hate. I am tired of looking at his face, hearing that larynx-farting voice, seeing that asshole-mouthed smirk and watching his entire criminal-enterprise cabal of a family treat the United States as a brand extension and its government as a private cash register. I am exhausted by his seeming inability to say anything kind, compassionate, loving, humble, appropriate or true, anywhere or at any time, about anyone who cannot flatter him, enrich him or serve him.

There is something profoundly unnatural about a human being so utterly incapable of tenderness. Even in moments that demand consolation, Trump reaches instinctively for grievance, self-praise or attack. He does not comfort; he exploits. He does not heal; he divides. He does not recognize pain unless it is his own, and even then it is usually the manufactured pain of an aggrieved narcissist furious that the world has failed to worship him sufficiently. His cruelty is not incidental to his politics; it is the connective tissue holding the entire movement together. It demonstrates power, thrills the faithful and provides the spectacle of a vulnerable person being punished so that those watching can feel temporarily superior. The cultlike atmosphere around him makes the indecency self-reinforcing: the more vicious he becomes, the more intensely they adore him, and the more intensely they adore him, the further he is encouraged to go.

That is why the cruelty frightens me more than the incompetence. Incompetence can destroy institutions through stupidity and neglect, but organized cruelty turns destruction into a mission. It requires victims and depends upon dehumanization. It teaches ordinary people to look away while their neighbors are targeted because the suffering has been wrapped in the language of security, patriotism and law. Once a nation accepts the premise that some people are less worthy of dignity, there is no stable limit to the list of people who can eventually be added. Today it may be the immigrant, the transgender child, the outspoken woman, the disabled reporter or the political opponent. Tomorrow it may be anyone whose existence, beliefs or refusal to submit become inconvenient to the people in power.

This cruelty once frightened the living hell out of me, and anyone paying attention should still be frightened by what it can become. But fear can no longer be the controlling response. My anger neurons are firing on all cylinders, and surrender is not an option. Courage and steadfastness are the only way through this, because if we fail to be courageous, then we simply fail. Silence will not save us. Politeness toward authoritarianism will not save us. Waiting for Trump or the movement surrounding him to rediscover decency will not save us. We must document what they are doing, name it honestly and resist every attempt to normalize it, because the greatest gift we can give cruelty is the exhausted silence of decent people.

America is standing at a crossroads where power is being pursued through deception, intimidation and the deliberate degradation of democratic institutions. One political party has surrendered itself to a dangerous man on a scale I have never witnessed and am not sure this country has ever experienced in precisely this way. His followers do not merely tolerate his defects; they celebrate them. His cowardice becomes toughness, his ignorance becomes authenticity, his cruelty becomes policy and his lies become articles of faith. Their allegiance is no longer grounded in a coherent governing philosophy. It is sustained by shared enemies and the intoxicating pleasure of watching those enemies suffer. Action is required from every one of us who understands what is at stake, because wanton tyranny does not retreat when it encounters good intentions. It retreats when it encounters organized, sustained and courageous resistance.

The America worth fighting for has never been defined by the people who sought to divide it. It has been defined by those who chose courage over fear, truth over propaganda, compassion over cruelty and democracy over authoritarianism. Every generation eventually confronts a moment when decency stops being an abstract virtue and becomes an obligation. This is ours. We do not have to become cruel to defeat cruelty, nor do we have to surrender our humanity to defend our country. Retaining that humanity is the entire point. We must be fierce without becoming monstrous, resolute without becoming indifferent and unrelenting without allowing hatred to hollow us out. The answer to Trumpism is moral clarity backed by action, the refusal to look away, remain silent or allow exhaustion to become surrender.

This morning, in a hospital examining room, a physician assistant listened to a tired man describe thirty-five years of pain and the growing weakness in his body. She could not promise to fix me, but she treated me with dignity. That simple exchange reminded me that empathy is not weakness; it is one of the highest expressions of our humanity. A decent society does not judge its strength by how efficiently it can punish the vulnerable. It judges itself by whether it sees them, hears them and refuses to abandon them. Yes, I am tired. Millions of us are. But exhaustion is not consent, disgust is not defeat and fear is not destiny. The choice still belongs to us. We can accept a country in which cruelty is rewarded and compassion ridiculed, or we can stand together and remind Donald Trump, his morally bankrupt administration and the political cowards who serve him that this country does not belong to them. It belongs to all of us, and if we still believe that truth matters, decency matters and democracy is worth preserving, then tired or not, frightened or not, we stand up now.

Michael Jochum — Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Music, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.