On the night of May 21, someone shot two young Israeli Embassy employees walking out of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., after an event. Police said the suspect shouted, “Free, free Palestine,” after he was arrested. In a New York Times post about the attack, one commenter suggested giving the shooter a medal. Another replied, “Just two? Sad.”

After Luigi Mangione was charged with murder in the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, a father of two, cheers and congratulations swarmed social media and people wore T-shirts that said, “Free Luigi.” Mangione’s defense fund has raised more than $1 million for his legal expenses.

Multiple reports have emerged of ICE detaining and deporting children — some illegally — including one case the ACLU publicized in which “a U.S. citizen child suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer was deported without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians — despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs.” On Twitter, people with American flags in their bios posted things like “so what?” and “Sorry, but I’m done with anchor babies.”

In each of these cases, what strikes me isn’t as much the initial events — distressing as they are — but the reactions from the public to them. The utter absence of empathy, the cruel and dismissive ways that Americans reacted, is the real tragedy.

Terrible things happen. They always have. But in the wake of those terrible things, our empathy for the suffering of others grounds us. It reminds us that life is precious, that children are innocent and that murder is wrong.

“There but for the grace of God go I,” we might say.

Lately, however, I’ve noticed a turn in our collective thinking. Before expressing pity, or empathy, or sorrow at a loss, we pause and reflect on a strange topic: the victim’s politics.

Before we feel empathy, we stop to ask ourselves whether the person was a Democrat or a Republican. Did they support the war in Gaza? Are they pro-vaccine? Did they vote for President Donald Trump?

The answers to those questions, bizarrely, inform the degree of empathy we will allow ourselves to feel for their suffering. It’s amazing the degree to which we can control our ability to be cruel to those with whom we disagree.

For, after all, our political beliefs don’t require that we harden our hearts.

It is possible to believe, fervently, both that the war in Gaza is unconscionable and that the murder of two young people simply for being connected to Israel is wrong. There is nothing incompatible about thinking that health insurers can be rapacious and destructive while also believing that shooting a man in the middle of a busy street is an unjust protest.

We do not have to abandon our empathy, yet we willingly do so every day.

It’s often said that anthropologist Margaret Mead defined the start of civilization as the first healed broken femur bone. When we started to care for people who couldn’t do anything for us in return, we became more than just animals. We became humans.

I hope that we are not going backward, reversing back through civilization to a time when we might walk upon a man on the ground, suffering from a broken leg bone and before extending our hand to help, ask him this:

“Well, who did you vote for, buddy?”