A World Without Neighbors

When empathy dries up

I come from the kind of place that isn't supposed to exist anymore.

A small town folded deep into the ribs of the Appalachian Mountains, where the hills rise up like shoulders drawn against the cold, and the past sits heavy in the dirt. The landscape is astonishing, if you don’t have to live in it. From a distance, it looks like myth – long, worn-down mountains rolling under a yawning sky, their green backs smoothed by time, clouds hanging low like they're too tired to climb up.

Up close, it's rusted trailers and chewing tobacco, Dollar Generals serving as landmarks, and a Walmart that doubles as the town square. The coal mines are mostly closed now. The men who used to work in them are either dead or limping. The ones who aren't drink, or pray, or listen to talk radio like it's the voice of God. No one really fixes anything anymore. Everything sags a little. Even the dogs look tired.

But it’s still home.

There are strange graces in the mountains. Here, if your car breaks down on the side of the road, someone will pull over. Not entirely out of kindness, but because not stopping would fracture the invisible scaffolding that holds this place together. If your kid is hungry, a church you’ve never stepped inside will still feed them. There’s a shared refusal to let anyone vanish completely. Strangers nod when you pass. They make small talk in gas stations like it might save them. There's no money, and not much hope, but there’s a shared human instinct in keeping each other alive.

And then the floods come.

They don’t come once. They come like seasons. Like reminders. Not just rain, but judgment – water in the lungs of the land. It rises up from the creek beds like something summoned, brown and slow and merciless. I’ve seen how it swallows homes and tears roads in half. When the floodwaters go down, they leave behind a smell that never quite goes away – rot, mildew, and something else. Grief, maybe. Or memory.

Each time it happens, there’s a brief flicker of national attention. Drone footage. A governor in a windbreaker. A segment on the evening news about climate resilience. And then, very quickly, the real response begins – the digital chorus of progressive Schadenfreude, smug and swift and gleaming with moral vanity.

“They got what they voted for.”

It always comes. Like a second flood, this one made of pixels and contempt. Tweets from people whose empathy is supposed to be their defining virtue. Blog posts written in the cool tone of anthropologists observing a failed species. Comments under news articles rejoicing that rural whites are finally suffering the consequences of their own ignorance. Drowned children become punchlines. Washed-away homes are metaphors. There’s no pity, only a kind of euphoric moral clarity. After all, these people are Republicans. Or something like it. They deserve it.

And now it's Texas.

Water again, pure and blank and neutral as death. Heavy rains tore through the central part of the state, flash floods bloomed out of nowhere, and the rivers swelled with the quiet appetite of fate. A summer camp, the purest distillation of American innocence, of popsicle-stick crafts and marshmallow songs, was caught in the deluge. Cabins were ripped from their moorings. Trees snapped like matchsticks. Little girls drowned in the dark, sucking in silt and panic.

And before their bodies were even identified, the reactions started.

The right people, the good people, turned their faces not toward mourning, but toward glee.

A pediatrician – a woman whose job is to cradle the fragile hinge between life and death – wrote: “May they get what they voted for.” Not "they" as in the parents, mind you. Not the architects of red-state policy. Not the elected officials. They as in the dead. The drowned. The girls.

And she was not alone. It would be a comfort if she were – a tragic outlier, a fluke in the moral machinery. But scroll long enough, and you’ll find an entire minor literature of progressive cruelty. They don’t say it so plainly. They use euphemism, or sarcasm, or rhetorical distancing. “Well, I hope they believe in climate change now.” “Actions have consequences.” “Voting has consequences.” “Elections have consequences.” Everything, apparently, is a consequence. And somehow, those consequences always land on the people least responsible. That’s the real miracle of modern liberal morality – it’s structured like a Greek tragedy, but with none of the poetry and all of the smugness.

Even those who didn't say it said it. The silence was thick. The activist accounts that regularly weep for bombed-out buildings in Gaza or burned forests in the Amazon had nothing to say about Texas. No candle emojis. No threads. No links to mutual aid. Nothing. Just the cold, dead quiet of selective empathy. They looked away, or worse, they looked through it – through the death, past it, beyond it – as if it were just the necessary prelude to a punchline they hadn’t finished writing yet.

And what makes this moment so grotesque, so unbearable, is that there is no enemy here. No opposing army. No occupying force. No clashing flags or historical grievances to explain away the violence. Just water. Just geography. Just nature doing what it does when we've built our world without listening. There are no villains here to boo. No boots on the neck. No crude justifications for "resistance." There is no story of rebellion, no grand dialectic, no revolution to cosplay. Just floodwater and dead children.

And yet the instinct remains to find someone to blame, and once they’ve been blamed, to stop caring.

This is where the cruelty reveals itself as not ideological at all, but aesthetic. It's not about what happened. It's about how it looks. Suffering, to be worthy of attention, must be beautiful. It must flatter the moral pretensions of the observer. If it does not reflect well on the onlooker – if it comes from the wrong state, wears the wrong hat, lives in a cul-de-sac instead of a tenement – then it’s not tragedy. It’s karma.

Because to the moral-political mind of a certain breed of progressive, Texas is not a place. It is a symbol. A synecdoche for everything wrong with America. It is guns and megachurches and border patrols and oil rigs and that vaguely threatening accent that sounds like your dad is about to say something racist. Texas is not a state; it’s a spiritual pollutant. And so when children drown in its rivers, they are not children. They are avatars. Symbols. Pawns.

What this painfully reveals is that for all the rhetorical inflation of “empathy”, for all the slogans about inclusion and justice, we are dealing here with a culture of moral sadism. A group of people who have spent so long building their identities around their capacity to care, that when the wrong people suffer, they experience it not as a tragedy, but as an insult to the brand. Suffering that cannot be used is discarded. Or mocked.

And there is something about water, too. Something eerie. Fire is ideological: revolutionary, cleansing, symbolic. Bombs are political. Police are political. But floods? Floods are just nature. They don’t care. They don’t choose. They take. They erase. And when you cheer for a flood – when you read about drowned children and your first instinct is to post a meme or a snarky tweet – you’re not taking a stand against oppression. You’re just siding with death.

And maybe that’s the real horror of it: not that some people are cruel, but that their cruelty has no reason, no principle, no aim. It is cruelty for its own sake. Cruelty as spiritual exercise. Cruelty as social signaling. Cruelty as entertainment.

Because if you’ve decided that your political opponents don’t deserve compassion – not even in the hour of their deepest grief – then the flood doesn’t wash away their sins.

It reveals yours.

We didn’t get here overnight. This isn’t just the rot of today’s internet culture or the madness of our current alignment. This flood has been rising for decades – and both sides have waded willingly into its tide.

Hurricane Katrina stands as a clear parallel of this same cruelty from the right. New Orleans underwater, black families trapped on rooftops, and right-wing pundits calling them “looters” and “welfare cases” before they even knew if they were alive. Those who were poor and couldn’t evacuate "didn’t deserve help.” They died waiting, and their sin was being inconvenient.

The 2010s brought their own wave of cruelty. The opioid epidemic ravaged red states – Appalachia hollowed out by painkillers – and the left laughed. Comedians riffed on Oxy addiction like it was karmic retribution for electing Trump. Whole families collapsed into death and despair, and their tragedy was rebranded as a case study in white resentment.

Then COVID. And the dam broke.

Unvaccinated people dying in ICUs were mocked in obituaries. Deaths of “anti-maskers” were celebrated, and Fox News viewers who died were marked with a digital asterisk: deserved. At the same time, right-wing media scoffed at overcrowded urban hospitals. Called the virus a hoax. Suggested blue states brought it on themselves. And the deaths piled up. On both sides. Unmourned.

When the Texas power grid failed in 2021, progressives circulated photos of iced-over living rooms and children huddled under blankets with captions that read like judgment. This is what you voted for. No warmth, no sorrow, just the cold arithmetic of cause and effect, moralized into punishment. On the other side, the right watched wildfires turn California to cinders and muttered that maybe if liberals loved trees so much, they should burn with them.

We have learned to stare at suffering and ask if it’s deserved. We have turned disaster into scoreboard. Death into proof. It is not just policy that’s polarized – it’s pity. Empathy has become partisan. And cruelty has become democratic.

No side owns this sickness. We all drank from the same poisoned floodwater.

Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism in 1979, but the diagnosis feels like it was scribbled in the margins of today’s social feed: a civilization where selfhood is a performance, where attention is currency, and where emotional life has been hollowed out and replaced with symbols of caring.

To Lasch, narcissism wasn’t vanity. It was a kind of spiritual rot. A defense mechanism against helplessness in a world that no longer promised security, continuity, or even meaning. The narcissist becomes obsessed with appearances, looking good, sounding right, and signaling virtue. Empathy becomes a posture, not a principle. Concern becomes an accessory.

We see this everywhere now, but nowhere more clearly than in the aftermath of suffering. Not real suffering, mind you – the kind that happens to people like us, the good ones, the branded ones – but the wrong kind of suffering. The red-state kind. The trailer-park kind. The kind that arrives on the backs of people who still say “sir” and “ma’am” and maybe voted for someone you think is a demon.

That suffering is not usable. It does not burnish the ego of the onlooker. It does not affirm their politics or their persona. So it becomes invisible, or worse – mockable. In this moral economy, tragedy only counts if it flatters the observer. If it doesn’t, it’s not injustice. It’s comeuppance.

This is moral exhibitionism: the tendency of a culture in decline to mistake expression for action, feeling for ethics, sympathy for sacrifice. It is not enough to be good. One must appear good, perform goodness, embody it in one’s aesthetics, hashtags, and consumer choices. Even grief becomes stylized. Even mourning is merchandised. We’ve turned empathy into branding and suffering into a test of brand loyalty.

If someone’s tragedy doesn’t pass the vibe check, it doesn’t exist.

So how do we unlearn this? How do we practice empathy for people who are nothing like us – who may, in fact, believe everything we find abhorrent?

In the late Middle Ages, in the towns of Brabant and Flanders, lived a group of women called the Beguines. They were neither nuns nor wives, existing in a liminal space – religious but not cloistered, detached from power but deeply embedded in their communities. They took no permanent vows. They lived in modest, self-run communities and devoted themselves to caring for the poor, the lepers, the dying. Their mysticism was radical and personal – God was not a distant monarch but a burning presence in the real, ragged body of the other.

Some Beguines were condemned as heretics. Others wrote ecstatic visions. Most of them died anonymously, having spent their lives bathing the sick, cleaning wounds, and praying beside those no one else would touch.

The point isn’t to romanticize them, but to note that they did the kind of work many would now find unthinkable. The actual work of love – untelevised, unrewarded, offered not to the deserving but to the merely human.

Contrast this with the online spectacle of empathy today where concern is meted out not according to need, but to tribal proximity. The kind of care that says “We don’t mourn them because they wouldn’t have mourned us.” Or even “They deserve it.” There is nothing radical in this. Nothing righteous. It is the logic of war, of blood feud. And it has colonized every inch of our discourse.

The flood is already here. Not the one on the weather radar – not the rainfall in Texas or West Virginia or wherever the clouds are dumping their grief this week. That flood is only a shadow. A symptom. The real flood is slower. It rises in silence. It seeps into language, into instinct, into the electrical circuits of how we see each other. The flood is spiritual. The flood is psychic. The flood is forgetting what a person is.

You don’t notice it at first. It doesn’t scream. It doesn’t crash through the windows. It just nudges you, post by post, laugh by laugh. You see a stranger’s suffering and the thought comes unbidden: They had it coming. And something recedes in you. A shoreline you didn’t know you had. A part of you that once knew how to mourn.

That’s the real apocalypse. Not a bang but a drift. The slow submersion of the moral imagination under waters too murky to resist. One day you wake up and there are no neighbors anymore – only enemies and allies. No citizens – only avatars. No children – only collateral.

And so, as the images trickle in – water up to the stop signs, bloated livestock turning in eddies, families wading through the remains of their living rooms – the reaction comes not with empathy, not even with silence, but with smirks and jeers. Another red state underwater. Another dose of retribution, algorithmically administered. Some click “like.” Others post memes. Always the same joke, rewritten a thousand times: Play stupid games, win climate catastrophes.

This isn’t irony. Irony has a shape. Irony at least knows the contours of pain. What this is, instead, is something colder. A politics of retribution hollowed out into an aesthetic. A mass psychosis of symbolic vengeance. The flood becomes a genre. People die, and the performance begins. They didn't vote right. They didn’t believe. They didn’t mask, or vaxx, or recycle. They were the wrong kind of human – the dispensable kind.

There’s a strange, squinting delight in watching the other drown. A joy that can only emerge when every disaster is framed as divine punishment for failing to be us. This new kind of cruelty doesn’t need to raise its voice or bear its teeth. It just shares a post, and lets the waters keep rising.

Because the real flood – the one that can’t be sandbagged or drained – is already inside. It’s in the way compassion has become conditional. The way suffering now requires a vetting process. Tell us your politics before we send the lifeboats. Prove your humanity before we mourn you.

There is no solidarity in this new world. Only branding. Only micro-audiences and targeted grief. And so while Texas drowns, half the country scrolls on, nodding in satisfaction at nature’s supposed sense of justice. Meanwhile, the water keeps seeping. Into words. Into thought. Into the blank, unfeeling depths where a conscience used to be.

This is how you build a world where no one is saved. Not because no one can be, but because no one thinks anyone should be.

The terrible truth is that empathy is hard. It’s meant to be hard. Empathy is not some ambient fog that wafts in and settles softly on the soul. It is violence against the self. It wounds. To feel for others – truly feel – is to permit their pain to colonize you, however briefly. And the world does not reward this. It punishes it. It marks you as naïve, unserious, weak.

Empathy is not only difficult because people can be cruel, misguided, ideological, and wrong. Empathy requires a suspension of judgment, and judgment is addictive. Judgment is clean. Empathy is muddy. Judgment makes you feel wise, resolved, above. Empathy makes you vulnerable. It makes you doubt. And in a time like ours – sharp, divided, cynical – doubt is treated like treason.

It’s easier, vastly easier, to believe the flood was earned. That death is karmic. That tragedy reveals moral failure. Because if the people suffering deserve it, then you don’t have to care. You don’t have to feel. You don’t have to take on the exhausting work of trying to hold in your head the unbearable contradiction that someone can be wrong and still not deserve to die choking on black water in their own attic.

But we must. Because the alternative is not neutrality – it’s rot. The slow, creeping gangrene of the soul. That’s what this flood really is: not water, but abandonment. Not drowning, but forgetting how to swim toward each other.

Actual empathy is hard. Yet it is the only thing that can hold back the tide. Not policy, not progress, not the correct takes. But the fragile, trembling recognition of the other as human, even when, and especially when, every part of you resists it.

This is the last act of resistance left. To feel, when every system, every algorithm, every mask of irony tells you not to.

To grieve what you are told to mock. To ache where you are expected to score points. To see in a dying stranger not a headline, not a voting record, not a digital echo of your worst assumptions, but a person. Flesh, breath, family, fear. Someone who screamed when the water came through the floorboards. Someone who held their child above their head until their arms gave out.

To feel this is not to excuse or endorse. It is not to flatten difference or pretend history didn’t happen. It is to insist that there is a floor below which our politics, our identities, our justifications must not descend. That beneath all the mythologies we wear, we are still soft, mortal things. And that suffering, in its rawest form, demands witness before it demands interpretation.

There is no dignity in refusing to feel. Only safety. And safety is not virtue. Safety is not solidarity. Safety is a kind of cowardice. It is the luxury of those who can afford to turn pain into spectacle because it is happening elsewhere, to someone else, behind a screen that never cracks. But the flood will find its way to you, too. It always does.

Because this is not about Texas or wherever the rain falls next. This is about the slow erosion of our ability to respond to suffering with anything but the tired language of sides. It is about the creeping suspicion that we have forgotten how to hold grief that is not our own. That we have mistaken cruelty for clarity. That we have begun to believe that love is something that must be earned.

But love is not a reward. It is a stance. A wager against the world as it is. And empathy – real empathy – is the first and most dangerous form of love. Because it asks you to see the enemy not as a cautionary tale, but as a human being. It asks you to let go of the thrill of being right long enough to let someone else’s pain in.

And that is how we begin to reclaim ourselves. Not through triumph. Not through moral certainty. But through the quiet, defiant act of caring – even when it hurts, even when it costs, even when it feels undeserved.

Especially then.

Because even when we choose to care, the damage has already been done – the flood has seeped in. The flood doesn’t recede. It doesn’t crash and then clear. It lingers. It soaks into the walls. It dries there, invisible, leaving a thin, white line – a memory of where the water once was. And we step over that line every day, unknowing.

It lives in the way we speak. In the silence after someone dies. In the casual shrug. In the little internal grin when suffering confirms what we already believed. It’s there, in our humor. In the news we ignore. In the lives we don’t grieve. A civilization with flood rings on its soul.

And the worst part is not that we’ve become cruel. It’s that we don’t notice anymore. That our thresholds have shifted so quietly. That we scroll past death the way you’d scroll past an ad for shoes. Not shocked. Not appalled. Just vaguely bored. Another body. Another region underwater. Another child with no future, used as a shield in someone else’s feud.

There are no monsters in this story. No villains with capes. Just ordinary people who, little by little, lost the reflex to care. Who stopped reaching for others and started calculating the cost of compassion. Who let the flood come and convinced themselves they were dry.

This is what the end feels like: not sirens, but forgetting. Not fire, but the quiet erasure of the human shape from our field of vision. One day, long after the waters rise again, someone might ask what we did with our hearts.

And there will be no answer.