by You would think that someone who grew up with the knowledge of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins murdered by the Nazis would have an inherent understanding of cruelty. But the opposite is true. I don’t understand how people choose to do things that are cruel. I do understand the effects of cruelty.
At current rate, it’ll be 10 years before Americans are adequately vaccinated against Covid—NBC News
McConnell Blocks Vote on $2,000 Checks Despite G.O.P. Pressure—The New York Times
First Known U.S. Case of Highly Infectious Coronavirus Variant Found in Colorado—U.S. News & World Report
December 29, 2020
Cruelty
by Ruth Neuwald Falcon, Seattle, Washington
Right now, the effects of presidential cruelty include leaving people to twist in the wind over the Christmas holidays when he wouldn’t sign the relief bill. It’s restarting federal executions after a 17-year hiatus. For the first time in history, “the U.S. government has carried out more executions in a year than all states that still conduct executions.” More than that: “More federal executions have been carried out in 2020 than in the past 57 years combined.” It’s playing golf day after day while the coronavirus is leaving some ICUs with “zero capacity.”
Merriam Webster defines cruelty as “disposed to inflict pain or suffering: devoid of humane feelings.” The Cambridge English Dictionary definition includes “causing pain to people or animals intentionally,” and lists barbaric, brutal, and inhumane as synonyms. The Free Dictionary says it is “willfully causing pain or distress; merciless.” It also says, “Not to be confused with crewel—worsted yarn for embroidery and edging.” Good to know.
I think cruelty involves lack of empathy, but I can’t find that in any of the definitions. None of them seem to mention causality. Perhaps it is that for which I am searching. If someone pulls the wings off of flies or tortures kittens, does it matter if they feel remorse for their actions? I think it does, but I don’t think people feel remorse if they aren’t able to empathize.
I get that Trump is a malignant narcissist, a term that was coined by psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor Erich Fromm in 1964. According to Psychology Today, Fromm suggested that it is “a severe and destructive pathology that can lie at the heart of the inhumane acts exhibited by dictatorial tyrants such as Hitler and Stalin.”
But it isn’t only Trump. Is half the United States Congress made up of malignant narcissists? That can’t be true. So how to explain the consistent callousness they display toward people who are less fortunate than they are? How to explain a Senate Majority Leader who appears to be “preparing a poison pill to doom the chances of increasing COVID-19 stimulus checks to $2,000″?
In 2018, Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic that, “The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track.” The title of Serwer’s piece? “The Cruelty is the Point.” Maybe it’s no more possible now to understand that cruelty is the point for far too many than it was 75 years ago when my grandparents were murdered. But that doesn’t mean it’s not important to keep struggling to do so. Perhaps the fact that so many of us are engaged in that struggle is what gives me hope.
Ruth Neuwald Falcon 
Jealousy of a group prospering in health through the discipline of Torah, groups fearlessly consenting to scapegoat others, claiming a right to a self-inflicted privilege to destroy others, ignorance!! The Maitraya says there will come a day when all people will get the message in their own language to awaken to save the planet and our humanity, and we have that ability now with the the internet’s simultaneous translating function.
No more excuses to not embrace each other affirming, to life! We have so much on this planet to awaken to as souls of the Creator.
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Ruth…you did a fine job in writing about a terrible subject: cruelty, and linking it not only to what our president and his supporters have been doing, but all the way back to what the horrible Nazis did to many including your dear family members. This was painful but necessary to read. May our new administration help to temper these awful acts!
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You so accurately paint the picture of these last four years, Ruth. Cruelty has erupted like a malignant cancer and run rampant. How could we have put a man in the Whte House whose small minded, calloused, self-serving greed, and complete lack of empathy has served as the power source for all this cruelty. There are some deep seeded failures in our cultural and institutional norms that gave us a Donald Trump. Will we have the integrity and moral courage to, finally, look at and deal with the root sources of all this pain?
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It is a rather chilling picture of our current government from the President down to his supporters. You are so right about the connection between a lack of empathy and cruelty. I felt that lack of empathy from the first time he spoke. I believe that Merriam Webster definition includes a lack of empathy in the words “devoid of humane feelings.” Thank you for sharing from your history and your heart as always.
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