empathy

Remember That You Are Dust

I wrote this on Ash Wednesday, which is the beginning of the season of Lent. The Ash Wednesday service includes a ceremonial act meant to remind each of us of our mortality. A priest “imposes,” or places, a smudge of ash on each congregant’s forehead, saying, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” That action and those words reflect the brevity and contingency of human life, while echoing Christianity’s Jewish roots in the understanding that human life must have both a beginning and an end. Psalm 103 puts the sentiment this way:

As a father has compassion on his children,
so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust.
The life of mortals is like grass,
they flourish like a flower of the field;
the wind blows over it and it is gone,
and its place remembers it no more.

You don’t need to believe in a compassionate divinity to feel the loneliness of that windswept field, that place that remembers us no more.

I’ve been ruminating on my fear of dying lately, as I contemplate the courage of the people of Ukraine, many of whom would, as the saying goes, rather die on their feet than live on their knees. It’s an expression I first heard in Nicaragua during the Contra war of the 1980s—mejor morir de pie que vivir en rodillas—although it’s an open question who said it first. In the 20th century, it was proclaimed by both Emiliano Zapata, the Mexican revolutionary, and the Republican heroine of the Spanish civil war, Dolores Ibárruri, also known as “La Pasionaria.” I wish I could discern in my own breast that passionate preference for a dignified death over a life of suppression or slavery, yet I find that I can’t make myself feel that way. When I think about death—dignified or otherwise—my mind strays again to that empty windswept field and I am afraid.

It’s odd—and a little disgusting—that I seem to share U.S. President Donald Trump’s horror about the numbers of people dying in Russia’s war against Ukraine. I also want that war to stop. I don’t want one more person to lose his or her chance of finding out how the story ends. Yet I also understand why people choose to fight (and possibly die)—in Ukraine, in Gaza, and on the Jordan River’s West Bank.

The Death of Millions

Here’s an observation often attributed to Russian autocrat Joseph Stalin that was, in fact, probably lifted from a German essay about French humor: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” Whoever said (or wrote) it first, the point is that, while we can imagine a single death with its personal details of life and extinction, the human brain has trouble truly grasping large numbers of anything, including deaths.

In particular, we’re not good at understanding the numerous deaths of people who live far from us. At the end of February, The Associated Pressreported that six infants had died of exposure in Gaza over the previous two weeks. One father said of his two-month-old daughter, whose body turned cold at midnight on a windswept Mediterranean plain, “Yesterday, I was playing with her. I was happy with her. She was a beautiful child, like the moon.”

The strategy of Musk and Trump is, in effect, to pile the corpses high enough that the numbers overwhelm our capacity for empathy.

We can imagine one child, beautiful like the moon. But can we imagine more than 48,000 babies, children, teenagers, adults, and old people, each with his or her own story, each killed by a military force armed and encouraged first by the Biden administration and now by that of Donald Trump? Indeed, while former President Joe Biden finally denied Israel any further shipments of 2,000-pound bombs (though not all too many other weapons), President Trump’s administration has renewed the transfer of those staggeringly destructive weapons, quite literally with a vengeance. Announcing an “emergency” grant of an extra $4 billion in military aid to Israel, Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently explained the shift:

Since taking office, the Trump administration has approved nearly $12 billion in major FMS [“Foreign Military Sales”] sales to Israel. This important decision coincides with President Trump’s repeal of a Biden-era memorandum which had imposed baseless and politicized conditions [emphasis added] on military assistance to Israel at a time when our close ally was fighting a war of survival on multiple fronts against Iran and terror proxies.

As Reutersobserves, “One 2,000-pound bomb can rip through thick concrete and metal, creating a wide blast radius.” That’s not exactly a weapon designed to root out individual urban commandos. It’s a weapon designed to “cleanse” an entire city block of its inhabitants. And we know that Donald Trump has indeed imagined plans to cleanse the rest of Gaza before (of course) converting it into the “Riviera of the Middle East.” Perhaps Israel can use its new bombs to level the rest of the strip’s remaining buildings to make way for Mar-a-Gaza.

Yes, we can imagine the death of an infant, but can we imagine the permanent displacement of more than 2 million of her fellow Palestinians?

People Are Dying—and They’re Just Getting Started

If you can wrap your head around the destruction of Gaza, you’re ready for an even bigger challenge, one about which the new regime in Washington has said exactly nothing: Sudan, where civil war and famine threaten the lives of 5 million people. Back in 2019, a popular nonviolent uprising dislodged that nation’s long-time dictator President Omar al-Bashir. Sadly, after a brief period of joint civilian-military rule, the Sudanese army seized the government, only to be confronted by a powerful militia called the Rapid Response Forces. The historical origins of the conflict are complex, but the effects on the Sudanese people are simple: murder, rape, and mass starvation. And the new Trump regime has done nothing to help. In fact, as the BBCreported:

The freezing of U.S. humanitarian assistance has forced the closure of almost 80% of the emergency food kitchens set up to help people left destitute by Sudan’s civil war… Aid volunteers said the impact of President Donald Trump’s executive order halting contributions from the U.S. government’s development organization (USAID) for 90 days meant more than 1,100 communal kitchens had shut. It is estimated that nearly 2 million people struggling to survive have been affected.

Nor are Sudan and Gaza the only places where people are already dying because of Donald Trump. The New York Times has produced a lengthy list of programs frozen for now (and perhaps forever) by the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Those include “HIV treatment programs that had served millions of people, the main malaria control programs in the worst-affected African countries, and global efforts to wipe out polio.” Even programs that count the dead have been discontinued, so we will never know the full effect of those cuts.

On March 5, a divided Supreme Court ruled 5-to-4 that USAID funds must indeed be reinstated for now. However, two things remain unclear: First, will the case be returned to the Supreme Court for further adjudication? And second, will the Trump administration abide by its decision in the meantime and release the funds that have been impounded? This seems increasingly unlikely, given Secretary of State Rubio’s March 10 announcement that 83% of those USAID contracts will be permanently cancelled.

His comments have rendered the legal situation even murkier. In any case, if, as seems all too likely, the administration continues to stonewall the courts, then we have indeed already arrived at the constitutional crisis that’s been anticipated for weeks now.

It’s not only overseas that people will die thanks to the actions of Donald Trump. While we can’t blame him for the recent measles outbreaks in Texas and eight other states, he is the guy who made Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services. And Kennedy is the guy who first downplayed the seriousness of measles; then, rather than vigorously promoting the measles vaccine, called it a matter of “personal choice”; and finally suggested that measles can be easily treated with Vitamin A. (In case you had any doubts, this is not true!) To date only two people—an unvaccinated child and an unvaccinated adult—have died, but sadly, it’s early days yet.

I know that certain of us may well be called upon, perhaps sooner than we imagine, to die for liberty here in this country.

Meanwhile, there’s a new pandemic sniffing around for potential human victims: the H5N1 strain of bird flu. It’s already led to the culling of millions of chickens (and a concomitant rise in the price of eggs). It’s also infected dairy cattle, cats, and even a few human beings, including one resident of Louisiana who died of the disease in January 2025. To date there are no confirmed cases of human-to-human transmission, but the strains circulating in other mammals suggest an ability to mutate to permit that kind of contagion.

You might think that Trump learned his lesson about underestimating a virus with the Covid-19 pandemic back in 2020. That, however, seems not to be the case. Instead, he’s endangering his own citizens and the rest of the world by pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization, where global cooperation to confront a potential pandemic would ordinarily take place. And Kennedy is seriously considering pulling an almost $600 million contract with the American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company Moderna to produce an mRNA vaccine against bird flu. That’s what I call—to use a phrase of the president’s—Making America Healthy Again.

Kennedy has also postponed indefinitely the February meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s advisory panel on flu vaccines. This is the group that convenes regularly to make decisions about which strain of seasonal flu should be addressed by the current year’s vaccines. Deaths from flu and attendant pneumonias vary across time. During the 2022-2023 season more than 47,000 Americans died of flu or flu-related pneumonia. Estimates of last year’s deaths exceed 28,000. Without effective vaccines those numbers would have been—and perhaps in the future will be—much higher.

There are many other ways Trump’s actions have killed and will continue to kill, including through the suicides of transgender youth denied affirming healthcare; or the deaths of pregnant people denied abortion care; or those of people who come here seeking asylum from political violence at home, only to be shipped back into the arms of those who want to kill them; or even of fired and despairing federal workers who might take their own lives. The list of those at risk under Trump grows ever longer and, of course, includes the planet itself.

As Elon Musk recently told podcaster Joe Rogan, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” And the strategy of Musk and Trump is, in effect, to pile the corpses high enough that the numbers overwhelm our capacity for empathy.

People will die and, as was true of the cruelty of Trump’s first term, their deaths are, in a sense, the point. They will die because he has undoubtedly realized that, no matter how long he remains president, one day he himself will die. His administration is, as he has told us, driven by a thirst for retribution. He is seeking revenge for his own mortality against everything that lives.

Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light

There is another murder I haven’t even mentioned yet, a metaphorical killing of a particularly devastating sort, one that will doubtless lead to many actual deaths before we’re done. I’m thinking, of course, of the death of our democracy. Many others, including Timothy Snyder, M. Gessen, and Anne Applebaum, have written about that process, already well underway, so there’s no reason to rehearse the details here.

Contemplating this already violent moment in our history, this genuine break with the rule of law and all that’s decent, brings me back to the meditation on death with which I began this piece. I’ve long loved poet Dylan Thomas’s villanelle on old age, “Do not go gentle into that good night.” As I climb higher into my 70s, it speaks to me ever more directly. The first three lines are particularly appropriate to these Trumpian times:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I’ve always been a partisan of the “rage, rage” faction. I’m not going gentle. Give me all the “heroic measures.” No do not resuscitate or DNR for me. And yet, paradoxically, our rage at the dying of democracy’s light will indeed drag some of us, I believe, burning and raving into that good night.

I know that certain of us may well be called upon, perhaps sooner than we imagine, to die for liberty here in this country. It’s happened before. I doubt I would (or should) kill for freedom, but I hope I would, if put to the test, be willing to die for it.