I Reckon: We have an empathy crisis for the South

In late August, Hurricane Ida touched down in Louisiana, with remnants of the storm pouring excessive amounts of rain into places as far north as New York. I’ve anxiously watched videos of the storm devour my social media feed. One video showed folks sitting out on their porch, watching as torrential rain pelted down, only to disappear in the floodwaters that surrounded their houses. 

Another video showed strong currents pushing a house against a row of trees; another showed strong winds pulling the roof off a hospital in southern Louisiana. After finishing a video, I would dive right into the comment section or Tweet thread, bracing myself for a repeat of the comments I saw on social media when Texas was slammed with a snowstorm earlier this year.

Many comments underneath the videos were, for the most part, empathetic toward those caught in the hurricane’s deadly path. Many offered prayers, and others inquired about how they could best support evacuation efforts. Celebrities and politicians, such as former President Barack Obama and former First Lady Michelle Obama, posted lists of organizations supporting relief efforts in Louisiana, Mississippi and other areas affected by Hurricane Ida. 

There was something refreshing about seeing well-known liberals offer action instead of bad takes in the middle of this catastrophe. Outside the context of extreme weather events, you’ll find a large number of tweets, comments and general statements generalizing the South as an irredeemable place full of dumb, ignorant rednecks. However, recent extreme weather events have brought out the worst in liberals who have decided that political affiliation should be a death sentence. 

Take Texas for example. Earlier this February, Texas experienced a freezing winter storm that caused widespread power outages — and, as of July 14, the death toll from that storm continues to rise. In the middle of that storm, left-leaning personalities took to Twitter to give hot takes that, quite frankly, nobody asked for. 

Perhaps the worst Tweet came from author Stephen King, who tweeted, “Hey Texas! Keep voting for officials who don’t believe in climate change and supported privatization of the power grid! Maybe in 4 years you can vote for Trump again. He believes in the latter but not the former. Perfect.” 

There’s a lot to unpack in that tweet alone. It can be summed up with this: It rather snidely told millions of Texans that they got what they deserved — freezing temperatures and rolling power outages, all for being reliably red in the past 6 presidential elections. Unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there. 

A few weeks after Texas’s snowstorm, filmmaker Michael Moore delivered a left hook and an uppercut to Texans in a tweet following the state’s lift on its mask mandate mere weeks after the snowstorm. It read: “Texas – we hear you. You didn’t want to be part of our electrical grid. And now you’ve removed your mask mandates & are allowing large crowds to gather. We hear you! COVID is a hoax! So u don’t need our precious vaccine. We’ll send it to ppl who are saving lives by wearing masks.” Let’s all be glad Michael Moore isn’t President Joe Biden’s coronavirus czar or in the healthcare field since he seems to think that political affiliation and geographic location are prerequisites for lifesaving vaccines.

It is rather disappointing that Stephen King and Michael Moore both possess an incredibly juvenile understanding of the complex political history of Southern states, especially that of Texas. Former President Donald Trump only won the state by 6.5% in the 2020 presidential election, the narrowest margin of victory since 1996, and recent demographic changes in the Lone Star State paint it as a future battleground state in the years to come. Texas is not a state full of white conservatives as millions of Black and Indigenous people and people of color, liberals and progressives have called it home. In fact, Texas has a long history of discriminating against voters of color, who are often left-leaning, thanks to gerrymandering efforts that continue to render their votes obsolete.

Texas’s political history brings up several important questions: Do liberal and progressive Texans deserve to freeze to death because of the decisions made by politicians they didn’t vote for? Do BIPOC Texans deserve it? Additionally, do Republican-voting Texans deserve the same fate simply because of who they voted for? 

Replace all of the mentions of Texans above with Louisianians. Louisiana is, in fact, more deeply red than Texas. If we, as a nation, still can’t answer “no” to all the questions above, then we’ve got to give ourselves a long, hard look in the mirror. The moment we become comfortable telling the other side that they had death coming when they checked off a box on a ballot that was different from ours, we value political groupthink more than empathy and care for our neighbors.

So, after Hurricane Ida subsides and Louisianians start the rebuilding effort, I urge my fellow liberals to retain some empathy for millions in the South who are having to pick up the scattered pieces of their life. If we really want to live up to the values of empathy and compassion that we always preach about, let’s redeem ourselves for how we treated Texas and start practicing what we preach down in Louisiana.

Quynh Anh Nguyen is a sophomore writing about current political events as an Asian-American Southerner and California transplant.