The newspaper, part 3: tender and vicious

Mimi, my only remaining grandparent, is a widow who has a dog named Rosie. On the phone with Mimi this morning she told me that two nights ago she became overwhelmed by loneliness and looked to Rosie for comfort. I take notes during our conversations, because Mimi says funny, fascinating, awful, shocking and sweet things all the time. Because I take notes and because Mimi has a slow southern accent (it's elegant-sounding, not backwoodsy), this should be verbatim:  "I felt suddenly that there was no life left in the world. Rosie sleeps on the floor in the summer. I said, 'Rosie, get into bed with me,' but she didn't, so I said, 'Rosie, please get into bed with me.' She has a big belly, and I just, you know, put my hand on it and felt her breathing. I've never felt that way before. I don't like to feel that way."

I have a bad habit of feeling sorry for people—it's bad for a lot of reasons but primarily because it's useless and condescending. The last time Aron and I were in Atlanta I saw a blind lady stepping off a curb and into the street, and I imagined that her life must be so difficult, and then I cried about it. The idea of the woman ever being insecure or afraid is deeply distressing to me. But those feelings seem to imply something unkind:  I must think she's too weak to deal with the same emotions that everyone else deals with, and I'm sure, upon reflection, that that isn't true—and if it were true that she was weak, then I should help her instead of feeling depressed about it. Anyway, I mention my tendency to feel (uselessly and condescendingly) sorry for people so that you'll know when I say that I don't feel sorry for Mimi, not even slightly, that it's not because of a general inability to feel sorry for people. Mimi doesn't let you feel sorry for her.

(At some point the difference between sympathy and empathy started to be discussed by everyone. Sympathy and empathy really shook up the culture. Maybe it was around the same time that the song "Ironic" came out and everyone liked to boast knowing that the song doesn't use the word right. People still seem to enjoy talking about that. Anyway, I'm too afraid of being reprimanded to use sympathy or empathy. Maybe the whole point of the lexical uproar was that people who feel pity shouldn't mistake that feeling for either of the more noble emotions of empathy or sympathy. Isn't it ironic that I just now came to understand what all that talk was about?)

Mimi is very matter-of-fact when it comes to expressing emotions that may make her appear vulnerable. When she says that she felt so lonely that she had to feel her dog breathe to reassure her that life remained in the world, she says it like she's reading the ingredients of a frozen dinner:  in bed, felt lonely, called dog, watched the up and down of lungs. All logos, no pathos. But she delivered, during our conversation this morning, a passionate diatribe about President Obama, who wants the government to own everyone's life, who is un-American, who wants children to grow up with parents who are on welfare and have no work ethic, who is changing the way this nation has been for two hundred years. All pathos, no logos. "He's a socialist," she said, "and I despise him." And I said, "He's doing better, but he's certainly no Socialist yet." Mimi didn't agree that he's doing better. 

Mimi thinks that how a person treats children and animals determines the quality of her character. I agree, but I would add to that how a person treats waitstaff. Mimi thinks that once you have a child, you never stop thinking about that child. I agree, but as I may have mentioned before, Mimi hasn't said "I love you" to my dad in years. You don't want to be there after he says it to her. It's awkward.

I guess it's because my parents have been divorced for so long that I tend to separate my family into poles:  my dad's side, my mom's side. Neither side is particularly demonstrative. Graham and I are touching, or close enough to touch, each other at least twenty hours a day. He might grow out of it, but I won't. My mom's mom, actually, was very affectionate. I remember sitting on her lap and holding hands, at the same time. During my conversation with Mimi, she said, "Your grandmother Zelma always had a garden." Sometimes she'd ask me to pick tomatoes before dinner. Mimi also grows tomatoes, and I've also picked them. She grew bell peppers this year too.

I don't understand anything. In epistemology there's a group of people known as process reliabilists who maintain that if a process that produces a belief a reliable, then that belief is justified. Reliability is justification-conferring. But it's a problem for reliabilists to articulate in a coherent and determinate way just how reliable a process has to be in order for the beliefs it produces to be justified. A comparable problem exists in ethics regarding the ascription of virtues. Like, how honest does an honest person have to be? 

The newspaper Aron brought home Wednesday featured an interview with a man, Matthew, whose truck every Athens resident recognizes. The truck is so recognizable because huge confederate flags attached to poles in the truck bed fly behind the truck as Matthew is driving. Through the course of the interview readers learn that Matthew is shy, lives with his elderly mother and enjoys knitting. Maybe morality needs an algorithm. There should be a band called The Algorhythms.  

Ascribing moral virtues and failings shouldn't be a challenge for me. It shouldn't be anything. I shouldn't do it. I should leave it to the professionals, like Nancy Grace. But I often find myself in extremely judgmental moods about my family members, and I'm not satisfied to regard them dispassionately and simply call them complicated. I was thinking today that listening to Mimi talk about politics is kind of like watching a dog have a dream. I'm enraptured by Jeffery's dreams, and I don't know why. But I don't judge him for his dreams. Maybe that's the lesson. But what am I going to tell Graham?