A Streetcorner Named Empathy
On guns, dogs, and finding common ground in a divided country.
In the town nearest my home, a smallish town on the San Francisco peninsula, there’s a street corner that evokes in me, at various times, pretty much the full gamut of human emotions. In many ways it’s a typical street corner. It has a coffee shop with a few tables outside where retirees sit and chat. Exercisers hang out after their morning workout. A man with a beard works on a crossword puzzle. Commuters rush in and out, grabbing their pre-ordered coffees on their way to the train station down the block.
When I’m standing on the corner sipping my first coffee of the day and chatting with friends, I feel relaxed and content. Paco usually feels comfortable here too, as it’s a familiar place and he knows that friends will stop to give him treats, or at least a friendly greeting. In some ways “the corner” is a little bit too familiar for Paco, but I’ll get to that in a moment.
Sometimes my feelings on the corner are more complex. When I look across the street at the imposing glass windows of the Apple Store, I feel an odd mix of pride and embarrassment. I feel pride because it’s the store where I bought my first iPhone, my first Mac computer, my first iPad, and numerous other devices and gadgets that fascinate me to no end. I don’t work for Apple, but 25 years breathing the rarefied air of Silicon Valley brainwashed me into believing that I’m part of a technology revolution, and that Apple devices are the badges of honor that my fellow revolutionaries and I wear on our sleeves to prove how valiantly we have fought. We fought against the men in suits, the tyrannical plutocrats who moved at a snail’s pace, even when it was obvious that the world needed disruption. We won the revolution, but we don’t seem to realize that we are the new aristocracy, and we’re just as obnoxious as the people we overthrew.
I feel embarrassment when I see the Burlingame police officers stationed in front of the Apple store every day, because it reminds me of how privileged I am to be able to afford a new Apple device every few months. A couple years ago there was a series of robberies at the store, often during the day when the store was open. Shoplifters would come in and scoop up thousands of dollars of devices from the tables, cutting the security cords before running out the door. Since then there’s been a police SUV parked in front of the store with one or two officers on duty, every day.
On the north side of the corner there’s a pergola where buskers sometimes play music on weekends, when the weather is good. My musical taste leans toward 1960s and 70s rock, but strangely my favorite busker is an old man who plays the accordion. Hearing him play makes me feel like I’m in old Europe, walking down a cobblestone street lined with centuries-old shops and taverns. When I’m in an especially upbeat-but-rebellious mood, I sometimes imagine myself asking him to play a rendition of Bella Ciao, a WWII-era anti-fascist folk song made popular by the Netflix show, The Money Heist. I imagine myself singing the lyrics as the accordionist plays the melody, with passersby stopping to join in, until we’ve gathered a large crowd. Even Paco would join in, punctuating the chorus with “Woof! Woof! Woof!” as the humans sing “Ciao! Ciao! Ciao!”
Occasionally I feel anger when I’m on the corner, like the time when I walked into the coffee shop and saw a man “open carrying” a pistol in a holster. He was not in uniform, so I assumed that he was a civilian who was openly carrying a gun for the sole purpose of intimidating and enraging the liberal residents of our town. If so, he certainly achieved that goal with me. I quickly spun around and exited the shop, fuming as I walked down the street to another coffee shop.
This was several years ago, before the incidents at the Apple Store, and before I had purchased a firearm of my own. But I think my reaction today would still be one of anger, albeit with somewhat less shock. While I own a shotgun, I would never carry it in public, except to transport it to and from a place where I can hunt or shoot. And I would never load it, except when preparing to shoot a bird or a clay pigeon. I simply can’t imagine myself loading a firearm with the intention of shooting, or even pointing it at, another human.
This is why the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17 year-old who killed two people in Kenosha in August of 2020, angered me so much, and why the not-guilty verdict on all counts angered me even more. The thoughts running through my head after the verdict went something like this: how is it fair that teenagers who shoplift from the Apple Store, especially if they’re black or brown, could spend years in prison, when a white boy can roam the streets with an assault weapon and kill two unarmed people, without so much as a slap on the wrist?
Up to this point I’ve only presented my own liberal point of view on these matters. But to follow the liberal train of thought for just a moment more, one practice that meditation gurus recommend is to nurture thoughts of gratitude and compassion for all people, including your enemies and people you dislike, disagree with, or even hate. So let me try this technique with Kyle Rittenhouse for a moment.
As with so many things in life, my experiences with Paco help me find empathy for Kyle Rittenhouse. There’s a behavior that dog trainers call “resource guarding,” and it’s a behavior that Paco tends to take to extremes. Paco will growl and lunge at dogs that walk toward us, especially if they don’t show adequate deference to his self-perceived alpha dog status. He’s been known to snap at dogs more than twice his size in the dog park, if they get too close to me or other family members. When I’m chatting with friends on the aforementioned street corner and a well-dressed business woman rushes past us into the coffee shop a little too quickly, Paco will bark loudly at her, as if to say, “Slow down lady! This is my corner. Your coffee will still be there in thirty seconds!” Paco does all this resource guarding without being asked, and sometimes even when we implore him not to do so.
On the surface, resource guarding is exactly what Kyle Rittenhouse set out to do, on that fateful August evening. After the shooting of Jacob Blake by a police officer caused civil unrest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Rittenhouse had apparently seen on an online forum that there was a car dealership near where a planned protest march was happening. The dealership had suffered arson damage the night after Blake was shot, and Rittenhouse’s online comrades hypothesized that the owner of the car lot would be grateful if people volunteered to guard the area to prevent further damage. Just as Paco will rush to guard resources that are not his own without being asked, Rittenhouse and his friend Dominick Black decided to guard the car lot, without any formal request from the car dealer.
Up to this point I’m able to follow the thought process of Rittenhouse fairly easily (with Paco’s help, of course). But to understand why Rittenhouse decided to arm himself with an AR-15-style military assault weapon that night requires me to exercise my empathy muscles more strenuously. Rittenhouse was not simply reacting instinctively to guard resources. He was succumbing to a string of emotions that are common in men of all ages, but especially to teenage boys who are struggling to make sense of a world that has been turned upside down by a stew of hormones.
The emotion at play here is what I’ll call “machismo.” Paco has helped me recognize my own susceptibility to machismo. When I first started thinking about getting a Spanish Water Dog, I was drawn to their strong, rustic look. They come in a variety of colors, but I wanted to get one that was mostly brown, because the curly hair of a brown Spanish Water Dog looks similar to dreadlocks when it gets long. As my wife and I got older and I felt my youthful manliness flagging, I thought that an athletic, dreadlocked dog walking beside us would restore my lost masculinity and make me look both hip and inclusive at the same time. It would be like having Patrick Mahomes befriend me and volunteer to join me on my daily walks to the corner coffee shop.
I didn’t realize how feverishly I had been trying to vicariously experience machismo through Paco until one day when my friend Jose told me that he had concluded that I was “like one of those parents who forces his kid to play sports against the kid’s will.” While I think Paco genuinely enjoys the activities that I do with him, I’ll admit that some of them probably stem from a subconscious desire to boost my coolness or manliness. I’ve taught Paco how to catch a frisbee with acrobatic leaps, to charge into the ocean and swim through crashing waves to retrieve a bumper, and as described in my last post, I’m teaching him how to be a pretty decent bird dog.
Little did I know that hunting is now considered by the most recent generation of gun owners to be the opposite of cool and masculine. The new crowd of gun owners apparently think that hunters are old fashioned wimps, because our firearms are not lethal enough. They call hunters fudds, after Elmer Fudd, the bungling rabbit hunter in Warner Brothers cartoons who talks with a lisp and never manages to kill Bugs Bunny.
The desire to be strong or masculine is not a bad thing per se, but when it veers into the realm of “toxic masculinity” it becomes a serious problem. My theory is that hyper-masculine behavior stems from self-esteem issues, and I suspect that’s what led Rittenhouse to purchase his assault weapon, and then to carry it to Kenosha. Everyone experiences dips in their self-esteem at times. If you’re an adult and lose your job, or just feel that your career has plateaued, you may try to boost your confidence by doing things that you think will make you appear more masculine. If you’re a student and you’re having problems in school or at home, you may take similar steps.
According to a very thorough article in the New Yorker about Kyle Rittenhouse, Kyle’s father was an alcoholic and eventually left the family, leaving Kyle’s mother to raise him and his two siblings on her own. Rittenhouse’s mother consistently had trouble paying rent, and the family was repeatedly evicted. On two occasions Kyle and his family had to briefly live in a shelter. Knowing this background, I can understand better how Rittenhouse fell into the trap that had been laid for him.
Paco eventually stopped guarding his food bowl. Not because I trained it out of him with force, but because I kept showing up at the same time every day, putting the bowl down, and walking away. He figured out, slowly, that I wasn’t competition. That the food would keep coming. That he didn’t have to treat every meal like it was the last one.
I think about that when I’m at the sporting clay shooting range, watching a first-timer from the city work up the nerve to rack the slide on a shotgun for the first time. There’s always a moment where you can see the fear and the fascination fighting each other on their face. That’s the moment. Not a lecture about policy, not a debate about Rittenhouse or the Second Amendment. Just a steady hand on the shoulder and a quiet word: it’s okay, I’ve got you, let’s try again. The people who learn to shoot that way — slowly, with someone they trust — almost never become the kind of gun owner anyone is afraid of. The people who were never invited into that moment are the ones I worry about.
I don’t know if any of this adds up to a solution. I’m not sure I believe in solutions anymore — not the kind you can bullet-point and email to a senator. What I believe in, after a lot of miles and a lot of conversations with people who don’t look or vote like me, is that most Americans are more like Paco than like the worst version of their political tribe. Scared, a little, of having what they love taken away. Willing, sometimes, to share the bowl — if someone they trust shows them how.