Compassion, Reason and the Plight of Senator Fetterman

It’s simultaneously permissible to empathize and also wonder aloud if Fetterman should continue to be a United States senator.

Compassion requires grace, but it should not suspend reason.

As a fellow human doing your best to fend off life’s hail of vulnerabilities, you should naturally sympathize with John Fetterman’s mental health ailment – a struggle that millions of Americans battle and are increasingly speaking candidly about. 

The schoolyard putdowns hurled at Pennsylvania’s junior senator on social media by prominent figures on the right are callous, tawdry and self-evident. One of the useful features of our ubiquitous media culture today is that many choose to confess their character in plain sight. 

As a rational minded individual, it’s simultaneously permissible to empathize and also wonder aloud if Fetterman should continue to be a United States senator. One of 100 in a partisan body separated by a single vote. Still recovering from a nearly fatal stroke. Which may or may not have precipitated this bout of clinical depression. Which can linger for months and in severe cases, years.

Yes, we should grant space to people who suffer from illness – mental or physical – without fear of wage loss or employment termination. But the job of U.S. Senator is not the one of a cashier or a software developer or a paralegal.

The job Fetterman holds matters because it’s a question of elevated public interest. There’s no such thing as “private” when you’re a high ranking political figure in 2023. Especially when it comes to cognitive aptitude, the ability to process questions and articulate your own answers on issues of national and global import.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about Fetterman’s condition and probably won’t for a while. 

It’d be acceptable to grant him unlimited time and enduring peace if he were an accountant in Altoona. Acknowledging there’s a different, more taxing standard for a sitting U.S. Senator seems obvious.

It also seems evident that Fetterman’s fragile health is not solely a logical question of public interest, but one that is in his very own interest. 

“What you’re supposed to do to recover from this is do as little as possible,” Adam Jentleson, Fetterman’s chief of staff confided to The New York Times before Fetterman checked himself into Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on February 16th.

And even then there wasn’t a clear sense of the strength of his health.

During an early February appearance with President Biden to tout water treatment infrastructure in Philadelphia, Fetterman’s prepared remarks were halting and disjointed, showing little progress since the lingual muddles he suffered through during last fall’s campaign. 

The remnants of his stroke recovery, still glaringly evident.