Empathy

Of surprise to very few people came the research that today's college student has measurably less empathy than those of the 20th century (see the metric and compare yourself to those kids). In my experience working with small children in the public schools, the trend is toward a kind of self-centered unreality, in which children are brought up to believe that they are the only important people, that others don't count, and that rules don't apply to them. (There are, however, brain scans to demonstrate that vegetarians have more empathy than the general population so we're not totally doomed. Yet.)

Much of this transition is being blamed on an adherence to video technologies. Without knowing more details, I will say that if TV and movies are more real to your children than your family, then they can't learn empathy. You need to feel for actual people, not pixels on a screen. TV and movies, for the most part, teach us to laugh at the misfortune of others).

Also this week, Joran Van der Sloot was accused of murdering another girl. Two years ago, this wealthy kid was implicated in the death of 18-year-old Natalee Holloway. He was released for lack of evidence, despite the video of him confessing to watching her die and asking a friend to dispose of her body. And now he claims that, although he brought 21-year-old Stephany Flores back to his hotel room in Peru, where she was found dead after he had fled the country, he is being falsely accused. Again.

I grew up on Chicago's North Shore, a magical land immortalized in such classes films as Ferris Bueler's Day Off and Risky Business, and, although Hollywood exaggerates, it doesn't exaggerate that much. I can tell you a few things about children being raised to equate their parents' money with a special status that exempts them from the rules.

But this is the example that sticks most in my mind. As a professional writer, I often work in conjunction with an SEO expert whose clients have specific goals, typically to achieve a higher SERP ranking. And a few years back, I was offered a peculiar job.

It seems that a very rich teenager committed a very ugly crime: a violent physical attack on a girl in his school for rich teenagers. It was big news. The kid, his parents, and his lawyers had all kinds of excuses for why this kid did what he did, and why it wasn't his fault, and why he wasn't a criminal, and why he shouldn't be held accountable for his actions. They had the money to protect the kid.

That's not all they had the money to do. You see, it was such big news that you couldn't Google this kid's (unfortunate and unusual) name , or anything close to it, or any of the details of the crime, without hitting a link that described, in graphic detail, the sick thing he did to his classmate. And this rich boy's parents did not think that was fair, since this would prevent their son (who, being rich, could not be held accountable to the rules that governed other, less special people's behavior) from leading the privileged life they had planned out for him. They wanted to bury the evidence of his crime with money.

Now, you cannot erase things from the Internet. You can delete pages, but pages are cached, and copied, and no reputable news source will delete news for money. All you can do is bury search results. Create enough content with your keywords, and your new content ranks on SERP, which the old content is buried so deep no one will see it. And I was asked, for money, to create enough content in this rich kid's name to bury the documentation of his crime. Then he could go to college and become a lawyer without anyone Googling his name and discovering the sick thing he had done, without remorse, as a teenager.

The money being offered for this gig was pretty amazing. And I had to decline. Because this is fucking wrong. But this is what is happening. All over the world. Guilty people are buying their way out of despicable pasts. This is not new; guilty rich people have always been able to buy get out of jail free cards. What is new is the growing number of people who don't feel responsible to the rest of the world, who don't care about or believe in the feelings of others, who consider themselves above the rest of the world.

That's sad.

Is Van der Sloot's number finally up? His rich father is no longer around to protect him; they say his money's running out. The father of the second murdered girl is wealthy, and angry, and convinced that he needs to punish the kid for both murders. So maybe we'll see justice after all.

More to the point, maybe one person will look at the trajectory of Van der Sloot's life and ask themselves what went wrong, and what they can do to keep their own kid off that path.

Empathy.