Sunday, November 15, 2020

Biden's empathy is fundamentally decent

Irish Times journalist Fintan O'Toole wrote a piece on president-elect Joe Biden in yesterday's paper, titled American's mourner-in-chief.

In the piece, talking about Biden's empathy, he writes: 

It is real and rooted and fundamentally decent. It has at its core the baffled humility of the human helplessness in the face of death that makes life "so difficult to discern".

As an antidote to Donald Trump's grotesquely inflated "greatness", it has authentic force. It is a different, and much better way, of talking about distress, of making pain a shared thing rather than a motor of resentment.

For anyone who works as a hospital chaplain these words resonate strongly.

No comments:

Featured Post

The World Cup turns up all sorts of crazy ideas, great fun

When England won the World Cup in 1966 it was said that it gave a great fillip to Harold Wilson and his Labour government, which had won a l...