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

Shooting in Minneapolis and the graciousness of Trump

The shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis surely must bring to mind Stalin’s comment: "A single death is a ...