President Biden's Health Announcement and the Cancer of Tribalism

There are moments when you’re reminded just how far people around you have drifted from the plot of humanity, when you realize how poisoned by politics your family members, friends, and neighbors have become; the capacity for cruelty of those you share a country with.As President Biden and his family revealed the grim details of his Stage 4 metastasizing prostate cancer diagnosis, they came flooding from the virtual woodwork, rushing to add their grotesque insults to his grievous injuries—and it’s something that would have never happened ten years ago.A moment that in any other past iteration of this nation would have brought a universal outpouring of empathy, instead became an opportunity for emotionally broken human beings to revel in the lowest of themselves in order to garner the cheap applause of other similarly embittered strangers. This is the price we are paying for the cultic sickness afflicting tens of millions of us: a shameless army of human beings so conditioned to dehumanize people across the aisle or the expanse of differing opinions that they are incapable of elemental compassion—or worse, they are simply unwilling to offer it.At moments like these, it’s easy to feel as though we are a country morally beyond reclamation; to wonder if anything can reach hearts this badly damaged.Cancer is nonpartisan in the horrors it visits upon this place. It is not a respecter of station, nor does it defer to a voting bloc. It claims no party affiliation or religious dogma. It is not a karmic cause-and-effect of a past policy position, the personal punishment of an angry God, or the Universe trying to teach someone a lesson.Cancer is a random, unpredictable, and brutal b*****d whose presence carries with it total upheaval to those it chooses to prey upon.As each of us understands from the terrifying road we have walked, either though our own diagnosis or that of someone we love, cancer just shows up and tears the s**t out of bodies and unleashes hell on families and brings us to our knees. Our response to cancer’s arrival should be nonpartisan, too. When seeing another family facing the scalding fear and overwhelming worry that the Biden family is surely surrounded by (regardless of their politics or theology), it should reveal the best of who we are as humans. If no other time, we should be able to call a truce in our political squabbles and verbal jousts and simply acknowledge the humanity in front of us.And maybe that is the dire diagnosis of America now: maybe this is the best of who some of us are; that there are no better angels left to call upon, no basic decency buried beneath the partisan posturing, no soft heart surrounded by layers of battle posture rhetoric. Perhaps, the advanced-stage tribalism afflicting millions of Americans has rendered them unable to see people like Joe and Jill Biden and their family as worthy of decency and respect as their own. Maybe they cannot or consciously refuse to feel affinity for human beings facing a suffering they themselves are likely no strangers to, because to do so would be to see the commonality in people they are conditioned to blindly hate.That is a collective cancer that we might not be able to overcome.The Beautiful Mess by John Pavlovitz is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit johnpavlovitz.substack.com/subscribe