Compassion Deficit Disorder by Judith Warner

http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/07/compassion-deficit-disorder/index.html

August 7, 2008, 9:52 pm
Compassion Deficit Disorder by Judith Warner

I spent a good deal of my just-completed two-week working vacation on Cape Cod thinking about playing cards.

Not actually playing them, unfortunately — I have somehow failed to transmit my own childhood love of Spit and Gin Rummy to my daughters — but mulling over the degree to which accusing others of card-playing has become a very sorry national pastime.

I spent the first week thinking of Michael Savage, the hugely popular, widely syndicated host of the radio show, ”The Savage Nation,” who last month went on a tear, essentially accusing autistic kids (and their doctors and parents) of seeking undue sympathy, victim status, and services for a malady that is in most cases nothing less than a “fraud” and a “racket.” (If you’re feeling strong today, take a listen here.)

Then came the comments by Rick Davis, Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, that Barack Obama had “played the race card” by noting that Republicans appeared to be trying to suggest to voters that the Democratic candidate “doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills.”

And finally, there was coffee with my niece, Margaret.

Margaret is an incoming senior at a large, suburban high school in the Midwest, who told me, one day, over a cranberry muffin, what it’s like to be applying to college in this particularly anxious admissions season.

She painted a bleak picture. Her classmates, she said disgustedly, seem to view the college admissions trials as an all out game of war, waged by combatants who are perennially flipping cards of gender, race, class, status and ethnicity, ready to cheat if they don’t like the luck of the draw. Some students, she noted, managed miraculously to discover their non-white ancestry just days before they had to check off their race on admissions forms. These same students had spent their junior years bashing Hillary Clinton for “playing the gender card” (the oft-repeated phrase.) They bewailed the terrible unfairness of a college application system that, they believed, gave unfair advantage to racial minorities and students from economically disadvantaged homes. Now they were racing to use any card they might have in their own decks — be it legacy status, or sports prowess, or family money enough to pay for the most edifying-sounding summer activities — to advance their own cause.

These were kids — mostly white, mostly comfortably middle- or upper-middle-class — who had grown up believing that they lived in a post-feminist, post-racial society. Who’d absorbed the ambient belief that measures like affirmative action, once put into place to address long histories of discrimination, were now little more than corrupt systems to be gamed.

They were truly their parents’ children, this much remarked-upon generation of non-rebels, kids who had internalized all their parents’ fears about their futures, and voiced those fears in the most unquestioning, un-self-aware ways. They were convinced of their own incipient victimhood: Because they were girls and everyone knew that college admissions were now weighted toward boys. Because they were boys and everyone knew that the whole system was biased toward girls. Because they were white and everyone knew that you can’t get in anywhere if you’re white. Or upper-middle-class.

To accuse someone of playing some sort of card — race, gender, or whatever — is to assume they’re trying to take unfair advantage and to assert that they have no genuine right to express a grievance or even to mere self-assertion. That such accusations have flowed so thick and rich in the past year of presidential campaigning and now circulate unquestioned among our next generation of college students, reflects two realities: one is the degree to which the meaning of the historical battle of America’s long-discriminated-against populations has been corrupted, and the other is the degree to which everyone seems to feel that the deck is stacked against them.
There’s a meanness that flows from this, and that airs itself most openly on the Internet and on our shock radio airwaves, whether in the rants of Rush Limbaugh or the sadistic sniping of Dr. Laura, or in the weird pride with which Savage has stuck to his guns on autism. And before you start equivocating, hemming and hawing that while autism is undoubtedly real, Savage may have a point about A.D.H.D. and the “cartel of doctors and drug companies” that he says push the diagnosis, tune in to how, one breath after bashing autism as a “fraud,” Savage took on the asthma card: ““For a long while we were hearing that every minority child had asthma,” he said. “Why was there an asthma epidemic among minority children? Because I’ll tell you why. The children got extra welfare if they were disabled and they got extra help in school. It was a money racket.”

I won’t dwell too long on this. I’ll just say that Savage is hardly alone in his views.

From where — other than ignorance — does all this ugliness spring? From a cultural moment when people feel locked in hand-to-hand combat, competing for an ever-shrinking stock of resources. The kids applying to college — in what promises to be, demographically, one of the toughest years ever — are feeling this whittling-away of the cultural pie most acutely. As a result, they’re particularly susceptible to the awful miserliness of spirit that accompanies periods of shortage.

Perhaps we shouldn’t judge them too harshly. Their mindset may be adaptive. When these kids graduate college, the economy may be even worse than it is today. If that happens, knowing how to play your cards right will be an even more valuable skill.