In which I remember Sister Mary fondly. (Public, so share if you wish.) Transcript below.

Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.

Today I’d like to talk about compassion, because it’s the number one thing that comes up when people express surprise over my beliefs. My books are filled with compassion, they say, which makes it startling that I am a professed conservative. Because, I’m told, conservatives “are stereotyped as leaning into their callousness.”

I wish you could see my expression when this comes up. Or maybe I’m glad you can’t. I don’t enjoy hurting people’s feelings, and “wow, that thing you just said is awfully bigoted” isn’t something I like revealing to people I think are well-meaning. But it’s honestly as exhausting as ‘all Hispanics are lazy’ or ‘all women are histrionic.’ Ugh.

But let me talk about compassion, and “callousness.”

If you were lucky enough to have two good parents, one of them probably kissed your knee when you scraped it… and the other one told you “if you hadn’t done that stupid thing, you wouldn’t have scraped your knee.” It’s the same dynamic that makes it necessary, for the sake of balance and best outcomes, to have someone comforting you about stuff that’s bothering you, and someone else helping you with ideas when you’re ready to solve it. Too much comfort is enabling in a bad way; too much problem-solving can be brutalizing, particularly if you’re not ready to hear it. But you need both.

One of the challenges of being a parent was figuring out how many walls I wanted to stand back and let my kid run into. My instinct was to protect her from everything: it’s the worst thing in the universe, seeing your children unhappy, and having to sit still while it happens is so, so bad. I can’t even describe it. But I also knew that to grow up healthy, she needed to get hurt and recover from being hurt, because that’s the only way to demonstrate to a new human being their own resilience. And, for maximum health, I had to let my kid discover that some things can’t be overcome or changed just because she wanted them to be different, and that this wasn’t the end of the world.

This is on my mind, somewhat, because I recently went back to my high school alma mater for various reasons… and one of the people still working there is my former guidance counselor, a no-nonsense nun who was high on the “solving problems” end of the scale and low on the “giving comfort” side. When I hit senior year and we started having discussions about college, I went to her for the requisite session about what I wanted to study. I told her, proudly, that I was going to go for a degree in aerospace engineering.

“Maggie,” she said. “That’s stupid. You’re not an aerospace engineer. You’re never going to be one. You didn’t even decide to take a fourth year of math because you hate math. Why don’t you pick something you’ll actually be good at?”

Well, you can imagine my outrage. I loved science fiction, I felt passionate about humanity’s future in space, and my dad was an engineer and by God Almighty, I was going to be an engineer! And… I left high school, went into college, and failed calculus twice, and the second time, when I dropped out mid-semester, I thought, “Okay, so maybe I hate math and I’m bored by engineering and this probably isn’t the greatest idea.” I switched majors from engineering to art, and went on to get my degree, and now I am a career artist/writer and from this distance I can see that Sister Mary’s ‘callousness’ wasn’t intended to hurt my feelings. She was trying to save me the grief and wasted time she could see coming my way like a freight train. (And the financial hit too, because I went to college on a scholarship that required me to maintain a 3.0 grade average, and the consistently poor grades I was earning in my engineering classes were threatening my ability to keep that scholarship.)

Now, maybe there’s some alternate universe where her rough advice inspired me to work twice as hard, and I became that engineer. That’s still not an indictment of her advice, because at the time, she was correct: I wasn’t invested in that path, scholastically, and it was patent from my behavior and my grades. The only way I could have succeeded was by making an enormous change to my behavior, and committing myself in a way I wasn’t committed when I went to her. Either way, her advice was necessary: either as a wake-up call that I had to do better, or as an observation that I needed to pursue something I actually cared about.

Is it callous to warn people that reality isn’t going to compromise with them? I don’t think so. It hurts to hear, and God it hurts to say it. It’s painful to let people run into the wall because you know they won’t listen to anything but experience. It’s awful to watch people suffer unnecessary pain, and it hurts to make them feel bad to prevent it. But not all the compassion in the world will change human nature, and it won’t change reality, and it’s not kind to pretend otherwise.

Was it callous for Sister Mary to tell me to re-evaluate my choices? On the contrary. I think she gave me that advice because she cared about me and didn’t want me to suffer. Her other choice—to tell me ‘oh, that’s great, go for it!’ would have been the cowardly route. It would have made her feel better, at the cost of me not hearing something that might have saved me from suffering. That I didn’t want to listen to her advice wasn’t on her: it just meant that in this case, I had to learn from experience that I was wrong.

But at least she tried to help. It didn’t sound like help back then. But looking back on it now, it’s plain to me that she had my best interests at heart.

Compassion, then, isn’t always a kiss on the knee. Sometimes, it’s pointing out that you shouldn’t have done the thing that got your knee scraped. Sometimes, it’s telling people ‘that thing you think will make you happy… won’t.’ And this… this is the defining characteristic of conservative compassion. The “callousness” we’re accused of isn’t callousness. It’s “this won’t work, no matter how much we wish it will.” It’s “this will cause more suffering than it alleviates.” It’s “we agree that this is a terrible thing, but we don’t think any of the ways you believe it could be solved… will solve it.” To mistake that for callousness is incredibly unkind.

Some of you will think ‘yes, but some people really are awful,’ and I agree. But that’s not a conservative failing. It's a human failing. And many terrible people have disguised their cruelty as compassion so they could exercise it at will, shielded by the defense that they care.

Me, I much prefer to comfort people who are having a hard time. But I also don’t believe in protecting them from reality… because telling someone that things will work out when all evidence makes it clear that it won’t… isn’t my definition of kindness. No matter how it sounds to the person receiving it, warning them that something’s not going to work isn’t meant to hurt them. It’s meant to save them from further pain. I know that’s hard to hear when you’re unhappy. But that doesn’t make it untrue.

I feel concrete examples are useful, so I’ll bring one up. I am skeptical of universal healthcare. I have never yet heard a universal healthcare plan advanced that I felt would work in America, with its specific laws and geography. I didn’t think the Affordable Care Act was a good idea. When I said so to a friend, though, she asked me if I wanted her elderly mother to die. I said, “Of course I don’t want your elderly mother to die,” but she insisted on bringing the conversation back to that point (which, I’m sorry to have to say, is a form of emotional hostage taking; if it’s subconscious, then all right, but that doesn’t change that it’s not a rhetorical strategy used by people who want to have a rational discussion). My instinct—to say ‘this is impractical’—should not inspire accusations of cruelty. It should inspire questions that will help us find a good answer. “Why do you think that?” “What do you think might become a problem?” “How do you think we could solve it?” are essential questions, and using them to brainstorm solutions brings us to something that might work. But you can’t get to ‘might work’ by ignoring people who say ‘this doesn’t look like it will work, for these reasons.’

The Affordable Care Act did pass, and I believe that friend’s elderly mother is insured. I have four friends with families, with small children, who lost their health insurance because of that act, though… and I myself got my hours cut at my job because allowing me to work over thirty would have triggered their legal responsibility to give me health insurance. Even though I didn’t need or want it, they had to, so they thought it would be best just not to employ me for 30+ hours.

I have not gone back to that friend and said, “Did you want my friends to lose their health insurance? Do you want them to die?” Maybe I should have.

This, then, is one of my philosophical touchstones. No matter how good some things would be, in theory, I can’t look away from the fact that, in practice, a lot of good things don’t work. There’s a reason they say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

People have asked where the “secret signs” of conservatism are in my books, because they can’t see them. So here’s my clue for you today. Look for the places where things can’t be changed, and how characters react to that… and recognize how often compassion is something we extend while understanding that sometimes, you can’t have the things you want, exactly the way you want them. That empathy is often deepest when facing that tragedy. This is a rich mine for stories, because the conflict between what we want and what’s possible is a human constant, and as someone who both loves people and knows that some things can’t be changed, I am always finding new themes to explore in that space… new stories that teach me how to accept and adapt to circumstances to find the best path forward, which is not always the path I thought I wanted, and new stories that help me try new ways to extend that compassion to people, without lying to them about the obstacles they face.

Compassion is a virtue that belongs to us all. Thank His name.

Anyway, that’s all I got. Thanks for listening to this bleeding heart. Jaguar out.