News Reporter: Act Four: What my allergies taught me about kindness

Friday 26 August 2016

Act Four: What my allergies taught me about kindness

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

An EpiPen epinephrine auto-injector, a Mylan product, is pictured above. Mylan, in the crosshairs over severe price hikes for its EpiPen, says it will expand programs that lower out-of-pocket costs by as much as half. (AP Photo/Mark Zaleski, File)

Longtime readers of the Act Four column and this newsletter will probably note that I don’t write about myself that much. I might mention my younger brother, for example, if I’m explaining how his existence in the world affects my critical preferences. But I am not, by nature, a personal narrative. Not to get all Eliza Schuyler about it, but I generally operate by the principle that the world has no right to my heart.

I made an exception this week, though, when the great Science editors at The Washington Post asked me to write about my experiences with food allergies and EpiPens, the medication that’s at the center of the latest drug-pricing storm. I’m sharing the piece with you all here both because the story was published in another section and won’t appear in the regular Act Four feed, and because I think allergies are an interesting metaphor for values like kindness and community that we discuss in my column.

It’s somewhat hard when you’re young to not be able to eat things, particularly sweets, due to a food allergy, a problem my parents solved at least at school by depositing a big stash of candy with my teachers at the beginning of each new year so I’d have something to enjoy while other students ate home-made treats during birthday celebrations. (A private candy stash is a decent mark of fourth-grade social status.)

But the incidents that marked me far more strongly were the occasions where someone actively couldn’t be bothered to check if something was safe for me to eat, or was contemptuous about the request. I still remember a bakery where a counterman lied to my parents about the ingredients in a cookie; a restaurant where a waitress couldn’t be bothered to check on the safety of a pie; and a D.C. restaurant where a server told me he’d rather not deal with me because I was a potential legal liability.

Obviously, these incidents didn’t work out that well for me, mostly in that I was denied dessert. And dessert is delicious. But I’m also not sure it worked out so great for those businesses or individual employees, who lost businesses, or in some cases tips, by refusing to do a fairly basic, decent thing.

It’s something I think about a lot when we discuss various high-profile questions about kindness to and accommodations for others. Without necessarily believing we should reshape the world to accommodate everyone’s personal experiences and preferences, I try to remember what I gain every day from people who do small, basic things to make sure I can experience the world in confidence and safety, who remember that my potential suffering has implications for them as well. The cost to me of asking about someone’s dietary restrictions, or remembering their preferred pronouns, or thinking through their sensitive spots when I talk to them is essentially nothing.