Of Apathy and Empathy

This week, a machine was kinder to me than any human I met.

I was on an early run, waiting at the crosswalk, when a car stopped well back to let me cross. In a city better known for entitlement than for kindness, that surprised me. I waved a thank-you as I stepped into the median — and saw there was no one behind the wheel. A Waymo. A driverless car. Nobody had to make it stop. Nobody had to make it kind.

Then I reached the refuge to cross the last stretch, and a woman in a Porsche saw me waiting and sped up to go first. Right after, a man on an electric bike turned onto my corner, didn’t see me, braked hard, and looked disgusted that I was there at all. Walking. On a sidewalk.

One machine, programmed to stop. Two people, choosing not to. I couldn’t shake the order of it.

You see it everywhere now. Parents who don’t look up from the screen while their kids play. Couples at dinner who don’t look at each other. We used to fear a needle wired into the back of the skull. Turns out all it took was a screen to stare into. The machines didn’t have to conquer us. We handed ourselves over.

That same night, the other side of us.

I read about a doctor in Nebraska. A four-year-old showed up for heart surgery alone — no parent, no adult, just a small kid in a hospital bed with the covers pulled to his chin. She was the one who found him there. Then she adopted him. Then she learned he had five siblings, and she got every one of them a home — some with her family, some with people she worked with. Six kids, scattered across a system, pulled back together because one person decided to.

That’s the part I can’t square. The same species that has to build kindness into a machine is the species that does that. Monstrous apathy and staggering empathy — same animal, same day.

Maybe technology really is the new opium of the masses. Maybe the developed world is rotting from the inside. I don’t know. But I know there’s a subset that sees it and turns their back on it — puts the phone down, looks up, and makes the technology serve them instead of the other way around. They know their kids are watching. They give them their full attention. Some of them still have a whole heart pointed at someone else.

I’m still hopeful.

So, how did my run end? I walked back through the door, and my kids looked up and smiled before anything else. That was enough.