Comment: Biden, his empathy what we need now to fight covid

Published 1:30 am Monday, March 15, 2021

By Monica Hesse / The Washington Post

For all the scrapper-from-Scranton talk that Joe Biden has cultivated in his career and his campaigns, the tough-guy act has always seemed like just that: an act.

The president never comes across as more cringeworthy than when he’s trying to be tough; when he’s suggesting push-up contests, or offering to wallop Donald Trump behind a barn, or bellowing “C’mon man!” as if someone hid the remote before “Jeopardy!”

And he’s never more compelling than when he drops that act, standing in front of America and revealing all his wounded brokenness. When he allows his voice to catch in his throat, when he acknowledges that weeping is sometimes the correct response to that brokenness, which afflicts not only him but the nation he has been charged with leading.

Playing the tough guy is part of his brand. Empathy, as we have long been told and long observed, is his superpower.

On Thursday evening, Biden summoned that power as he delivered a televised address to the country. To talk about vaccinations, yes, but mostly to step into his promised role as America’s “Commander in Grief.” To show that mourning is not a detour on a path to healing. The path goes straight through it. It is the only route, the rockiest one, we will linger there longer than we want to before we eventually emerge into the light. “It may be the most American thing we do,” he said. “Being strong in all the broken places.”

Throughout the pandemic there have been two approaches for how to get through this and then put it behind us. The first is a fake-it-til-you-make-it approach. It treats the coronavirus as if it were something we can pile-drive into submission if only we are strong enough or defiant enough or willing enough to pretend as if there’s nothing to fear but fear itself.

In this model, we would muscle our way to victory by continuing to go to Zumba, eat at Wing Stop, get our hair cut. In this model, masks are a sign of weakness, an absence of grit; burn them in a trash can! In early March, the governor of Texas announced that face coverings were no longer mandatory and all business restrictions were lifted, as if it were only capacity limits keeping some patrons out of restaurants, rather than continued caution for their own health. The country would heal when the economy healed, we were repeatedly told under this strategy; as if the virus knew or cared about the gross domestic product.

Biden’s approach has been the opposite. He spends far less time boasting that we are stronger than the virus and far more time acknowledging the ways in which the virus has been stronger than us. “It has exacted a terrible cost on the psyche of so many of us,” he said on Thursday. “For we are fundamentally a people who want to be with others, to talk, to laugh, to hug, to hold one another.” The virus is “a shared experience that binds us together as a nation. We are bound together by the loss and the pain of the days that have gone by.”

Biden’s approach says that we need to acknowledge these losses, because it is only by admitting to the gaping holes in our hearts that we will fully understand, as a nation, how desperately we want to fill them.

And maybe then, in the humble face of so much loneliness and pain, we will do the real and final work to end this thing. We will stay masked, get vaccinated, and in July we will celebrate Independence Day with our neighbors.

None of this should be confused with the “empathy” most often associated with politics; the kind manifested via summoning thoughts and prayers. Those execrable three words are murmured by sorrowful elected officials in times of tragedy, but rarely burdened with any actual plans or action.

Empathy is only worth anything if it is accompanied by both, and so Biden also talked about the American Rescue Plan’s child credit, additional unemployment benefits, additional small business assistance.

“And if it fails at any pace,” he said, “I will acknowledge that it failed.”

If it fails.

These are three words that are not typically uttered by politicians. The words admit the frailty of government and the frailty of Joe Biden himself. They convey the tenuousness of hope and the pull of sadness that have long been tangled up in who the man is, and what has shaped him: a son struggling with addiction, who found many rock-bottoms before recovery. Another son lost to cancer, a wife and daughter lost in an accident.

“The fight is far from over,” he admitted on Thursday.

“Scientists have made it clear that things may get worse again,” he said.

“But I need you, the American people. I need you. I need every American to do their part. And that’s not hyperbole. I need you.”

Some of us may not see the use in mixing the appearance of strength for an admission of vulnerability. On Thursday, Biden seemed to telegraph that one could not exist without the other.

We are not solely made of our grief, says the man whose superpower may not, after all, be empathy, but rather his ability to acknowledge what it means to walk through pain together even while knowing there are no promises as to what life will look like on the other side. We are not solely made of our grief, but damned if it doesn’t help make us who we are.

Monica Hesse is a columnist for The Washington Post’s Style section, who frequently writes about gender and its impact on society. She’s the author of several novels, most recently, “They Went Left.”