“I fear that in every elected office, members will obtain an influence by noise, not sense. By meanness, not greatness. By ignorance, not learning. By contracted hearts, not large souls…There must be decency and respect.” — John Adams

I use this rule in deciding whether to write about Donald Trump right now: if he is frightening people or traumatizing people, then I get the urge to try and bring some clarity and reason.

I loved writing about politics and was good at it. It is a gift I can someways offer, hopefully with humility.

Otherwise, I write about my life and my farm. It’s nice to have those choices. I seek a spiritual life, and empathy is at the core of that. It is also the foundation of my idea of writing.

Watching the Electoral College Ratification drama and judging by the volume of anxious and frightened and angry messages I am getting, this is a good, even necessary time to write about it.

Here’s how I feel about Donald Trump. If I were asked to cite the single most powerful and evident poison in our system now, I would say it is the lack of empathy we have for one another, that we have for him, and that he has for us.

We are moving rapidly towards a society that judges each other by who we vote for and what label we can pin on each other, not by who we are really like. We label one another; we no longer talk to one another.

We retreat into the shrinking wisdom of our own angry and fearful tribes.

Living in a small town in the country has helped me to see the people I’m afraid I have to disagree with people who see them only as dumb and dangerous bigots. I see them as real human beings, who mostly want the same things I do out of life.

And they haven’t been getting them. We are far apart in so many ways, but face to face, I see that we are all human in much of the same ways.

Political parties manipulate us into demonizing, fearing, and even hating people who disagree with us because it benefits them, not us.

Every day, I hear some say, “oh, he’s a Trump person,” as if that defines someone. Every day, someone says of me, “oh, he’s a liberal or a Biden person,” as if that says all that needs to be said. I read that people who have different political positions are refusing to marry one another.

Increasingly, I am told Donald Trump is not deserving of empathy because he has caused so much harm, especially to women, and is damaging our political system.

But think about it. That means we only seek to understand the people we already like.

Increasingly, people tell me I am not deserving of empathy because I have sometimes criticized Trump. If you like Trump, the other side need not listen to you. If you support the Democrats, half the country dismisses anything you say.

That is causing a lot more damage to America than Donald Trump or his core of cowardly sycophants, truly a gang that cannot seem to shoot straight. Political leaders and citizens retreat into their own small bubbles and stay there, no matter what.

First, empathy.

Empathy is the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another of either the past or present.

Empathy refers to the ability to relate to other people’s pain and anger as if one has experienced that pain themselves.

Compassion refers to both a feeling of empathy and concern.

“For instance,” wrote Daniel Goleman in the New York Times, “People who are highly egotistic and presumably lacking in empathy keep their own welfare paramount in making moral decisions like how or whether to help the poor.”

Christ’s first faith was empathy, not domination.

Empathy and compassion do not require forgiveness or absolution. Empathy, to me the highest call of humanity, asks us to understand others, not forgive or absolve them.

Both sympathy and empathy have roots in the Greek term pathos meaning “suffering, feeling.”

Empathy conveys understanding. Sympathy conveys commiseration, pity, or feelings of sorrow for the misfortunate of others.

This week, people who care about our democracy have every right and reason to be angry and concerned by this almost insane and clearly irrational assault on an election that 90 federal judges have found to be valid. In our country, the courts, not partisan politicians, resolve voting disputes.

Even healthy, it is appropriate to be anxious about the idea that elected leaders, without any substantial proof, would seek to overturn the votes of 80 million or more people because their candidate did not win. I have no doubt they will pay for that stand, perhaps as soon as tonight in Georgia.

But as we move ever close to perpetual confrontation and he-said-she-said controversies and stalemating, it also becomes clearer and clearer that culture without empathy is sick and crippled, because we have no way of understanding one another, and thus addressing concerns, suffering and grievance before they erupt and endanger our whole system of governing.

Tens of thousands of people are dying of Covid-19, yet I heard a man in a parking lot last week telling a friend with absolute certainty that the pandemic is a hoax and not a real danger. So no, he wouldn’t wear a mask.

I also got a message from a woman in California telling me that anyone who supported Donald Trump is stupid, crazy, or a bigot.

It’s hard to see a way back together in a country that only permits one or two ways of thinking and refuses to understand or consider any other.

That understanding is empathy.

This dividing works for political parties and elites like corporate CEO and billionaires. It keeps them in money and support. It also keeps the people from addressing the real problems in our country or from uniting together to bring about meaningful changes.

Politicians mostly no longer tell the truth to people, and for any democracy, that is a malignant tumor.

A country with no empathy is a sick country, and this is in many ways the reason a mentally disturbed demagogue like Donald Trump will come to power and stay by taking the most extreme – and non-empathic – positions to draw fanatic and truth-averse followers.

One thing ties this movement together – as it ties many on the left in different ways –  an almost universal lack of empathy – for minorities, the poor, women,  Mother earth, refugees and immigrants, public education.

In the 19th century, Charles Dickens counted on producing an empathetic response in his readers strong enough to make them buy each novel’s next newspaper installment. Today, when reading a novel such as A Tale of Two Cities, only the most hard-hearted reader could fail to feel empathy for Sidney Carton as he approaches the guillotine.

One who empathizes suffers along with the one who feels the sensations directly. Empathy is similar to sympathy, but empathy usually suggests stronger, more instinctive feelings. So a person who feels sympathy, or pity, for victims of a war in Asia may feel empathy for a close friend going through the much smaller disaster of a divorce.

This week, as much as any other, challenges me to define the boundaries of empathy and a test of my sincerity and authenticity.

I write about empathy a lot, and I know that empathy is a posture, and I am false if I only apply it to people I admire or agree with.

I also know that hatred and fear are pointless, geographies, spaces to cross. These feelings solve nothing and promote the worst kinds of inner turmoil, especially during a week like this.

I believe empathy heals and keeps me ground. Rather than hate, I work hard to do good and try to understand. And then fight for what I believe.

The lessons of this week are already emerging, even before the next two days of anger, argument, and futility.

First, our democracy seems stronger.  The measure of a democracy isn’t that everyone agrees; it’s how the system tolerates disagreement.

Many millions of people who usually pay little attention to our civic structure and rarely even vote are deeply engaged. That is perhaps the healthiest thing that has happened to our democracy in decades.

Millions of people have moved from indifference and selfishness into a time of activism, engagement, and participation.

Almost every element of our democracy – state and local government, a volunteer citizenry, governors, secretaries of state,  judges – have rallied in support of our tradition of peaceful transfers of power.

Yes, Trump is dangerous, and yes, it is disheartening and outrageous that as many as 13 United States Senators and 140 congressmen and women support the unconstitutional overthrow of a legitimate election.

But Trump has been defeated and rejected and cannot possibly turn this election around. He and his cohorts plan their own selfish futures, and I believe they will pay for it. Despite big money dominating American life, people are still powerful.

There is a wisdom to them, as well as a mob.

But check out some history.

At least half of America opposed separating from England in 1776 and throughout much of the war. Their opposition was fierce and often fatal. Nearly half of America supported slavery, and hundreds of thousands of Americans gave their lives to preserve it; they paid a much higher price for their sedition and treason than the senators will.

So did the rest of the country.

Most Senators opposed our entry into World War II and fought against it right up to Pearl Harbor.

14 Southern senators were expelled from Congress for refusing to accept Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860.

America has never been unanimous in its morality, generosity, or fidelity to the Constitution. We can wish that every single U.S. Senator was brave and honest enough to stand up like many of them are, but there was only one Daniel Webster.

This idea of the noble united country is a fantasy, not a reality about democracy, which is simply the best way to govern there is, not a perfect way to govern.

We have always been a fractious mess, a broken egg.

H.L. Mencken is valuable reading for any American who is frightened or despairing. He loved democracy but saw it clearly and mercilessly:

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

His prophecy has come true. We are still standing.

I’m sorry, but Donald Trump is perhaps the most powerful symbol of the danger and damage that comes from abusing children. The mothers of serial killers testify again and again that their murderous sons were horribly abused in childhood and grew up to be monsters.

Monsters beget monsters, as Fred Trump has reminded us.

Rather than hating Trump, we might think more about how we raise our children, and how we do or don’t protect them. They are the ones who grow up in a world where sick people with guns can enter our schools and kill them in their classroom seats.

America is, in many ways, on the ropes, even in decline. There is no hiding from that. But we may be making a better country, not just celebrating the existing one.

We elect a sociopath and cannot protect our citizens from guns, dysfunctional health care, or a pandemic. We are asking now, and not for the first time,  if democracy can still work for us. Trump is reminding us that democracy is precious and must be loved.

A lot of us forgot.

No matter the outrageous rhetoric, lying, name-calling that goes on over the next two days, Joseph Biden will be President on January 18.

I do feel empathy for Donald Trump, which is not the same thing as forgiveness or absolution.

He will be held accountable for his sins and transgressions, in this world or the next.

It is well worth remembering the noted psychiatrist, who said Trump’s narcissistic disorder could have been treatable in his childhood but has developed into an unreachable pathology in adulthood.

He is a sociopath now, dangerous and uncontrollable and we will all have to pay for a cruel and unempathetic culture that created him and allowed him to rise to the top.

He is completely unfit for a job as complex as the presidency. What kind of country would do that to itself and why? Alexandr Putin is the man of the hour, we are becoming what he wants us to become.

Trump’s battered psyche is telling us what his unthinking supporters tell us – our country is broken and needs urgently to be fixed.

That’s not on Donald Trump; that’s on the rest of us. There are no more magic wands in politics than there are in life. People like Stacey Abrams aren’t just talking the talk; they’re doing the work. They are getting it done.

And that means it can be done.

Our democracy is far from dead or even on life support.

The Republic stands bloody but so far, unbowed.

The state officials did their jobs. The judges did their job. The Supreme Court did its job. Eventually, even most of the media did its job.  Most of the congress will do their jobs. Even our sycophantic vice president will do his job.

He has no choice. Business leaders, generals, and Republican leaders are demanding that Congress stop trying to overturn a state election all over the country.

Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are making the same mistake Donald Trump did throughout his office time.

Pandering to the base doesn’t work if you’re running for President. Everyone gets to vote, not just your followers, which makes Trump so crazy now.

I can only imagine what Hawley’s opponents will have to say to him next time around.

Hawley and Cruz and their gang will regret having the “sedition” label tagged on them for the rest of their political lives. They might be keeping their base happy, but the rest of the country will never forget what they tried to do.

That’s how democracy works.

This week challenges us to understand what is happening rather than fear it or hate it or obsess on it.

Our democracy may be in some trouble, but it is not yet ready to keel over and die. Listening to the Donald Trump Georgia tapes, I felt a stab of true empathy for this tortured and unmoored man causing so much trouble.

It is hard to put up with him and see the harm he does, but it would be harder for me to live in that tortured head. He deserves pity.

In some ways, he is yet another example of a cruel culture that has forgotten empathy, compassion, and sympathy. Our culture creates a lot of monsters, too many.

On Thursday night and Friday, the Republic will still be standing, and so will we.

Congress will not overturn the election; troops will not take to the streets to keep Donald Trump in office. His departure will alter the political landscape in many ways—power matters.

The truth will eventually out, as it always does. And hopefully, empathy will help make me a writer of some value, not just another big mouth.