The State of Casual Contempt

The Lazy Hate That Has Us In Its Grip

I was just visiting my mother in Florida. She’s frail, and our hearts hurt when we think about it. Aging can be so cruel, and nothing prepared me for the sight of my mother too weak to get out of bed. I sat with her and we talked and laughed and reminisced. My mother apologized for not being interesting, and the fact that she thought she had to entertain me broke my heart.

She needs a lot of help now. As I sat with her, a near-constant stream of caregivers visited us. They washed her, treated her ailments, and fed her. These women, all of them were women, shared their stories with me while they worked.

They talked about long double shifts on their feet, children lost to overdoses, other children who were living far away, sick spouses, and extended families who relied on their income. The weariness under their kindness showed. These women were working so hard and yet they were so sweet. Their laughs were not the brittle titters of people about to break, they were the knowing laughs of people who knew pressure and endured.

My mother apologized again for her helplessness. I asked her if she stared at me when I was a baby. She admitted that she did. I asked her if my helplessness as a baby diminished her joy at being a mother. It did not, she confessed again.

There’s something about helplessness that strips away everything but heart. What is left of a person when all their utility is spent? When they have no power to act but only to be, they become even more human, utterly divorced from output. The beautiful fact that love is not a transaction is made plain when one party has nothing to give the other but themselves. Is that why the Christian story has such power in the image of God coming to us in the form of an infant? Perhaps.

After the visit, I sat in the airport, my heart still raw and unprotected. A woman beside me scrolled on her phone and a story caught her attention.

“Japan doesn’t want to buy our bonds. We bombed them once, we should do it again.”

She announced this to the man beside her. It was the middle of the day, they were both dressed well, relaxing in an airport, just thumbing through a catalogue of resentments prompted by her news feed as they waited to board her plane. Casual, thoughtless contempt.

Behind me, another man noticed an article on his phone about Canadians selling their Florida homes due to concerns about crossing the border.

“Good luck. I wish them the worst,” he declared to the woman beside him.

It felt like a call and response of the faithful as they received their toxic liturgy from their priests. The smugness, the detached, lazy spite, the self-satisfied judgement. It was as if they were role-playing a Roman Emperor giving a half-hearted thumbs down to a gladiator, commanding a murder for their entertainment out of boredom.

Meanwhile, working-class women I’d just left were still cleaning bodies, spooning apple sauce into mouths, lifting people into showers, while these spiteful flyers in positions of comfort delude themselves into believing that they’ve never had it so bad.

These would-be bombers of Japan and annexers of Canada are in charge of our fate. This lazy contempt and flaccid resentment are steering us like a drunk, passed-out captain. His limp hand rests on the rudder, twitching in his mad dreams and steering us fitfully into the rocks while the crew toils below deck, unable to rest long enough to even see the shipwreck coming.