Donald Trump lacks something even more basic to humanity than empathy. Where is his sorrow?
Donald Trump’s Sunday rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden was only the most recent of the many hate fests that have marked not only his campaign this year but arguably his entire history as an American political figure. Reading the Bulwark’s report, I stopped when I hit the words “Tucker Carlson.” That was enough.
I went back, however, and read more mainstream coverage looking for a mention of any emotion that was not connected somehow to hate, fear or prejudice. I didn’t find one. Of course, I wasn’t expecting to find any of the normal stuff typically absent in discussions about Trump and his minions – empathy, humility, kindness. I knew that a Trump rally would be a desert when it came to anything smacking of what MAGA and its Dear Leader consider weakness.
Still, I was looking for even a hint of the strength necessary to feel sorrow. I saw a story in Popular Mechanics, of all places, about the 17,000-year-old skeletal remains of a child that was discovered in 1998 in southern Italy buried in a cave in Monopoli, a town on the Adriatic Sea. Recent DNA analysis of the remains revealed that the child died when he was about one year and four months old, probably of a congenital defect called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a condition which makes the walls of one of the ventricles in the heart thicken until they can no longer pump enough blood to keep a body alive. So, 15,000 years before the date which marks the start of our calendar, a truly ancient man and woman had a baby that died probably before he could walk or speak.
There are cave paintings in France depicting bison, other animals and humans from this time, called the Upper Paleolithic Era.
