How will we respond to this regime's cruelty?

Will the suffering of so many awaken us to a new consciousness?

As day after day, I am brought to tears by reading about the terrible suffering this administration is inflicting on people in our community and in communities all over the world, I have come to believe that the most crucial question facing us at this moment is the question of how we relate to this pain. Will this moment of Great Shattering affect the way we experience ourselves and our relationship to the community? Will the worth of the self, so prized and cherished, be tempered by our experience of being connected to this worldwide web of suffering?

Oh, the self!

It was the late sixties and the early seventies. I was in Chicago, young, wide-eyed with surprise and wonder to find myself at the heart of a revolution in the field of psychology happening in that city at that very moment. Chance and good fortune landed me, a twenty-three-year-old MSW Social Worker, on the University of Chicago Department of Psychiatry faculty working as a clinician in their outpatient department. While most of the Western world’s understanding of the mind was focused on Freud’s physics of the mind: the warring forces of id, ego and superego, the psychiatric cognoscenti of Chicago were taken with the work of Heinz Kohut, who redirected the focus to the self and to the development of self-esteem.

It was heady stuff back then: the importance of maternal mirroring of the child’s feelings and strengths for the development of a stable sense of self; the capacity to regulate self-esteem and escape the hell of shame or the poison of narcissistic rage. Not having had a mother who was particularly focused on MY dear self, I was sold on this new theory!

But the self was just what the grasping, gasping corporations churning the machinery of capitalism and their henchmen in the advertising industry were waiting for! The self, separate from nature, separate from community, striving for self worth as reflected in the purchase of the best shoes, the biggest house, and the ambitious attainment of the best jobs in the big law firms, not because those jobs offered a chance to defend justice and care for community but because those jobs beget bigger feathers so you can fly higher and others will point to you high in the sky and marvel.

But it is lonely and tiring up in the sky where you are not part of a flock: a murmuration, constantly changing shape, turning, swooping, responding to each other’s movements.

But could it be that the impact of this extreme cultural centering of self is finally being revealed for all its flaws and in this revelation are the seeds of another kind of life, another way to think about who we are and what is important?

I hear all around me now a new word to replace self: community. And new words to replace self esteem: care and empathy for others. I have lived 80 years on this earth and never heard such language spoken so passionately by so many. My impression is we are hungry for this moment of giving up the obsession with ourselves and joining that murmuration of energy and care. At last Saturday’s Hands-Off demonstration in Augusta, the opening remarks were given by a young man in a yellow vest, a set of big headphones resting on his shoulders, who identified himself as a paramedic from a family that has lived in Maine for hundreds of years.

“My great-great-grandfather invited those who needed care to his table, no one was left out, so did my great-grandfather and my grandfather and my father and now, so do I. We need to look around us and identify those who need to be invited to our table, those who need our care.”

Every speaker who followed him said the same thing: we need to care for our immigrant population, afraid to leave their homes even to get food or medical supplies; we need to help women get reproductive care; children get medical care; support the people of Gaza from Israel’s genocidal takeover. Their conception of government was an institution concerned about the pain of others and charged with a moral obligation to respond to that pain. As this message reverberated through the crowd and people cheered each speaker’s concept of community and care, I was profoundly moved.

I found in that language and raucous cheering and chanting a deep sense of letting go of the boundaries around my self as I merged with a collective voice and spirit in pursuit of the most basic of human instincts: compassion. In the pursuit of self, meaning is confined to small acts of plumping and puffing. In collective action around care, there is meaning, richness, and joy. This is the murmuration of life I want to be part of and it seems to me, so do many others.

But beware! The MAGA thugs are waging a war on our empathy and our compassion.

This week, as I was contemplating this idea of the inconsequentiality of the self and the importance of compassion at this moment of great pain, a friend sent me a link to this chilling piece in The Guardian, Loathe thy neighbor, Elon Musk and the Christian right are waging war on empathy, from April 8. I urge you all to read all of it. Here’s an except:

How we relate to the pain of others is a question that always lurks beneath our politics, but it’s one that is particularly relevant now. In its first months, the Trump administration has begun to implement a radical rightwing regime featuring mass deportations without due process, draconian cuts to domestic and foreign aid programs, and venally self-interested foreign policy – a set of policies that amount to a prescription for mass suffering and death. Whether Trump succeeds or fails in his quest to remake US society is very much a question of how much of the pain of others Americans are willing to abide in the pursuit of making America great again.

The author makes the case in this piece, so startlingly true and terrible, that too much empathy will get in the way of Trump and MAGA’s agenda, so it is important for them to find ways to turn us away from the most basic of human instincts.

Several weeks ago, I wrote that there is one thing Trump/Musk can’t take away from us: our ability to care. Well, I take that back. Empathy is now being called a sin. And Bishop Budde is now being cited by the Christian right as an example of that kind of sinner.

On 21 January, the Right Rev Mariann Budde delivered a message from the pulpit of Washington National Cathedral to a newly inaugurated President Trump. Immigrants and LGBTQ+ children were living in fear, the Episcopal bishop of Washington said. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”

Budde’s appeal was standard fare for a denomination that has been inclusive of LGBTQ+ people since 1976 and, like many churches, undertakes ministry work in support of immigrants and refugees. But it touched off a firestorm among some of Trump’s evangelical supporters, who saw in Budde three outrages – the ordination of women, tolerance of LGBTQ+ people and support for immigrants – with a common, rotten core: empathy.

“Do not commit the sin of empathy,” tweeted the Christian podcaster Ben Garrett with a photo of Budde in her religious garb. “This snake is God’s enemy and yours too.”

Another Christian podcaster, Allie Beth Stuckey, tweeted: “This is to be expected from a female Episcopalian priest: toxic empathy that is in complete opposition to God’s Word and in support of the most satanic, destructive ideas ever conjured up.”

We can not allow this manipulation of the very basis of our humanity to stand!! Care and empathy are now our greatest forms of resistance. Wow. Dare to care. Dare to have Mercy!

I invite you now to literally wear your care and your mercy close to your heart.

As some of you who may remember, my son, artist Colin Sullivan-Stevens was inspired by my wish to carry Bishop Budde’s words close to my heart to create a image depicting Bishop Mariann Budde speaking truth to power during her 2025 Inauguration National Prayer Service. After watching the service online Colin set about to capture the gleam of positivity in her eyes, her vibrant presence in the moment.

And now that image is available on t-shirts and posters at havemercyonus.org. Check out the website, tell your friends about it and spread the word that cruelty will be confronted by courage and acts of care and mercy. The project is now a fundraiser for the ACLU of Maine so by purchasing one of these items you will not only be doing your part to inspire others, but you will be helping the ACLU defend those in need of legal services.

The most extraordinary thing happens when people who know the Bishop Budde story first see this image! First, their face softens, their eyes widen, and then, almost universally, they take their hands and put them over their heart. An image of Bishop Budde on your wall, or on your chest as you go about your daily tasks is a reminder of the very basic human instinct which connects us to our life’s most basic force.

I hope you will buy one or both of these items…not to make anyone rich in the way of money, but rich in the way of community, of shared values and morals and ideals.