SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
When former president Joe Biden acknowledged his cancer diagnosis in a statement on social media, he included a photograph with his wife, Jill. Together, they thanked members of the public for their words of support and uplift, and expressed their resolve, noting “we are strongest in the broken places.” It’s a sentiment he’s shared before when he talks of national unity and massive tragedy.
Joe Biden announced on social media that he has prostate cancer.Credit: Facebook
But this is not a test in the face of a sweeping disaster. It’s a much smaller, more human scale. Does the country have the capacity for empathy – empathy without qualification – in spite of the rancour, the distrust, the alternative facts, the lies? In spite of everything?
Biden’s personal message about his cancer consisted of only three brief sentences. His post-presidency office had issued a lengthier announcement earlier that described his health in more detail, telling the public that he had an aggressive form of prostate cancer and that it had spread to his bones. The statement read as dire, but it offered a bit of light. There were options for “effective management”.
In the president’s social media note of thanks, he was pictured sitting next to his wife as she leans into him. He was looking down toward the camera with a toothy smile. Jill Biden’s expression was sober.
There was a lot layered into that image of the couple. The angle of the photograph suggests that it might have been a selfie, with all of its implications of intimacy. The message is that it was simply the two of them alone in that room aside from Willow, the gray cat that the former first lady cuddled in her arms. But neither the president nor the first lady is looking directly at the viewer. And so, while the photograph seems intended to draw people into a close circle, the effect is almost the opposite. We are reminded that, as always, we are outside – this marriage, this family, this presidency – looking in. Trying to make sense of it all.
Now that they’re out of the White House, the couple had no obligation to share this difficult news. As the country has learnt, so much about the presidency – and the post-presidency – is rooted in norms and a code-of-honour, rather than hard and fast laws. But Biden moved through his White House years as a traditionalist, a standard-bearer of normalcy. So, he informed the public.
The disclosure has raised a host of questions. There’s the sheer shock that a cancer the medical establishment has always billed as slow-growing has already metastasised. How does this happen to someone the public presumes has the most attentive medical care imaginable? He had an annual physical each year as president, but in accordance with medical guidelines, had not received the PSA screening test for prostate cancer since 2014.
The diagnosis adds to the ongoing questions surrounding Biden’s health while he was in office. It provides fuel for those who lean into conspiracy theories or simply mistrust the government and its leaders. The diagnosis has led some people angry about Biden’s support of Israel and its war in Gaza to muse about karma and comeuppance. Others wonder about the fairness of who gets sick and who does not.
The announcement reminds everyone of the ruthless complexity of cancer, as if such a reminder is ever really needed.
Joe Biden’s personal message about his cancer consisted of only three brief sentences. Credit: AP
Biden’s sobering news also raises the question of whether the country still has the capacity to offer empathy untainted by political rivalries, ongoing quests to gain the upper hand and stick it to whomever one has declared the enemy. President Donald Trump offered his best wishes to Biden and then began raising questions about medical malfeasance and cover-ups.
“If you take a look, it’s the same doctor that said that Joe was cognitively fine, there was nothing wrong with him,” Trump said. “If it’s the same doctor who said there was nothing wrong there, that’s being proven to be a sad situation.”
The president’s eldest son moved swiftly to sarcastic accusations that somehow the former president’s wife, a doctor of education, should have diagnosed his prostate cancer forthwith, while also mischaracterising the cancer as “stage 5.”
“What I want to know is how did Dr Jill Biden miss stage five metastatic cancer or is this yet another cover-up???” read a post on Donald Trump Jr’s X account.
For years, one of Biden’s most distinguishing characteristics has been his empathy. He has had the ability to use his own struggles and heartache to inform his understanding of the hurt that others feel. He tackled a significant stutter as a child and used that triumph to help others find ways to do the same. He moved through the grief of losing his first wife and daughter in a car crash and, years later, his son Beau to cancer. He channelled that pain into a vocabulary for talking about loss that recognises how sorrow doesn’t disappear, but simply becomes part of the texture of daily life.
In some respects, Biden simply excelled at an aspect of the presidency that was long assumed. Presidents were supposed to feel Americans’ pain. Hear the voiceless. See those living in the shadows regardless of their political party or ideology. That is changing. Today, the presidency targets the vulnerable. It quashes dissenting voices and fetishises brute strength. The focus on empathy remains. But only because so many in the country notice how little of it there is.
How much empathy can the country muster for Biden? In both red states and blue ones? In the well-lit spaces on social media and in the darkest corners? Among his supporters and those who voted for his rival?
Biden doesn’t have the benefit of having been out of office for years. And while he has been on a redemption tour of sorts, only history can define his presidency. Nostalgia hasn’t had a chance to cast him in a warm glow. The scars of a political dogfight haven’t even begun to scab over. The old ones are still raw and weeping, even as the country accumulates new ones.
Vice President J.D. Vance argued that it was possible to have two thoughts about Biden at once: to wish him good health while also, essentially, calling him a terrible president in the same breath.
“You can separate the desire for him to have the right health outcome with a recognition that whether it was doctors or whether there were staffers … I don’t think he was able to do a good job for the American people,” Vance said.
But when it comes to empathy, the question is not whether people can hold two thoughts in their mind at once. It’s whether, if only for a moment, they can manage to hold their tongue when it comes to one of them.
Robin Givhan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and columnist. This article first appeared in The Washington Post.
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