What Admitting My Wife to the Hospital Taught Me About What's Wrong With America
Channel: Steven D Talks
Date: 2016-12-18

The worst emotion, the one that increases the divisiveness in personal relationships are expressions of contempt for the other person.  We know this to be true based on studies of marital couples and other close relationships.

When I admitted my wife to the hospital Wed. night for a serious, acute illness, we experienced contempt from various hospital staff because they did not understand why my wife was screaming and incoherent and having a panic attack due to her chemo-induced brain injury. She was was overwhelmed by all the stimuli an ER Room generates: beeping noises,  people shouting, loud TVs playing and caregivers asking rapid fire questions of her too fast for her to process during her long night of pain, terror and sensory overload.  They just assumed she was bad news, and I was too, for not being able to give them what they needed to complete their intake procedure. To them, we were a waste of space, and a waste of their valuable time.  We were beneath them.

Reflecting back upon it today, I had an epiphany.  This is precisely the emotion that is destroying and dividing our country.  It's a phenomenon, propagated by politicians and the media, both social and mainstream alike, that leads us to hide out in our own little bubbles and hold others we know nothing about in contempt. And why do we that? Because of the lies and disinformation that reinforces lazy thinking and the easy acceptance of stereotypes we have all been told about each other, lies spread by those in power who wish to keep us divided.  

One can forgive anger, even hate, even murder, as the families of the victims of the Dylann Roof killings have shown. But contempt - the expression of disdain and revulsion and for lack of a better term, "holier than thou attitudes" by those who express it openly - is among the most significant emotional pains we experience, the one that is hardest to forget and forgive, because it is so demeaning  when we are the ones being reviled and stepped upon.  Contempt, even more than hate, contributes to the willingness of so many to cheer the suffering of others, even the outright murder and abuse of innocents, because they are "one of those people." 

Whether fostered and nurtured through factional strife, spiteful political discourse, absurd and dangerous assumptions about others based on someone's race, religion, class or any of the many categories people use to label other people, those nasty little boxes where they can just  assume the worst about entire communities and groups of people, it is a great evil.  And the all too frequent open expressions of contempt, revulsion, disgust and disdain for those with whom we disagree, and who in like manner hold us in contempt, as well, is evil.  The spreading of this poisonous emotion in our society directed at any and every other person, based solely on a single characteristic, or political opinion they might hold,  has to end if we are to salvage this country.