Sarah Gassen: Nasty email shows others as expendable

The emails arrived early last Thursday morning in response to a column I’d written about the writers group at Our Place Clubhouse, a community space for people living with severe mental illness.

It’s a good program that helps people, specifically folks who don’t often find a place where they feel they fully belong. Brain illnesses like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and depression still carry a stigma, and coping with them can be a lonely and challenging endeavor.

The first email was a smile in my inbox – its last sentence evidence of Tucson’s welcoming kindness.

“Is there anything that I can do to help?”

I recognized the sender of the second email by name. He sends me insulting missives with some regularity. I clicked, expecting the usual diatribe against liberals, people of color who dare point out that opportunity isn’t equal, President Obama and “people like you.”

This email went beyond all that. His anger and bitterness oozed.

“You usually write about fringe areas of society and how they’re not accepted.

“While it would seem noble, how do these ‘writers’ and other borderline society misfits make a living?

“Who pays for them?

“You always want the world to be nonjudgmental. To be soft and cuddly. But these groups of people you champion need to step up and earn their keep in life.

“Society/taxpayers should not pay the burden of supporting people who can not support themselves.

“Years ago if you couldn’t do that, you ‘perished,’ and very probably, rightfully so.”

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He continued:

“Sounds cruel but is not. It’s been going on for centuries in the animal kingdom, and for humans.”

My first question: What awful thing happened to this man to make him see the world in such a stark, sad and heartless way? What a lonely existence that must be.

Maybe I’m being overly hopeful in assuming that a person couldn’t possibly be this mean from the get-go in life.

Humans aren’t expendable. And no matter how much we tell ourselves otherwise, none of us is self-reliant. We need each other. We need friends. We need help, some more often and in different ways than others. Humans also possess a need to share, to create community and be needed. It’s what makes us civilized, decent.

This letter writer isn’t alone in his ruthless disregard for others, although it’s often not so plainly expressed. We see it in the Republican presidential primary and in Republican statehouses, including Arizona, where lawmakers cut off food stamps to hungry neighbors and withhold affordable medical care from children in poor, but often working, families.

The political and cultural atmosphere today celebrates brutishness and ignorance, and teaches that you can win only if I lose. Kindness, intelligence and empathy are derided as weaknesses by people like the email author, when in truth these are among the strongest of human qualities. None of us is immune to the reality of health and happenstance.

We’re each shaped by our experiences, and what we’re taught along the way. But we also decide how to view people we don’t know, those whose lives are different from our own.

It boils down to a straightforward question:

Do you see another person’s struggle with the effects of illness, poverty and discrimination as their own, individual failing, or can you see enough of yourself in the humanity of others’ experience to offer just a little kindness?

It’s your choice.