When a right-wing figure dies, suddenly the people who spend their days justifying or ignoring violence discover empathy. They’ll tell you “a death is a death” as if life holds equal value across the board in their worldview. But where are those words when children are gunned down in schools? Where is that empathy when Palestinian families are slaughtered under U.S.-funded bombs? Where is it when systemic violence claims lives every single day?
It’s not there. Because for them, “a death is a death” doesn’t mean all lives matter. It means their lives matter. It means people who share their ideology deserve to be grieved publicly and sanctified, while the countless victims of the systems they defend are dismissed as “collateral damage.”
This selective mourning is not compassion. It’s politics dressed up as morality. It’s weaponized empathy, trotted out to silence critique and demand reverence for people who built their careers on dehumanizing others.
If you only recognize the humanity of those who look like you, think like you, or vote like you, then you don’t actually value human life, you value your tribe.
Until these same voices express outrage with the same urgency for the deaths of the powerless, the dispossessed, the marginalized, their sanctimony rings hollow.
A death isn’t just a death when power decides whose life is worthy of grief and whose is not. And if we’re going to talk about respect for the dead, then we need to start with respect for the living, the ones whose deaths could have been prevented if empathy weren’t rationed out by ideology.
Sisyphus Shrugged 