Little Morsel #4: Make Empathy Great Again
This morsel was written before the events surrounding Charlie Kirk’s death. It is not a reaction to that news, nor an attack on any individual. It is a meditation on empathy—how it's weaponized, politicized, and quietly removed from the national bloodstream.
If you're reading this as partisan critique, take a deeper breath. This isn’t about left or right. It’s about iconography and hypocrisy. About how we’ve taken the face of a refugee messiah and airbrushed him onto a border wall. About how a painting of compassion can trigger more outrage than the policies that inspired it.
This piece isn't satire for sport. It’s elegy disguised as sarcasm. It’s reverence dressed in irreverence. It’s a reminder that realism, when done right, doesn’t just depict pain—it reflects power. And sometimes the most dangerous thing you can do is simply refuse to look away.
If empathy is weakness, then Jesus was the weakest man who ever lived.
Try telling that to the people foaming at the mouth over some paintings.
Rigoberto A. Gonzalez paints migrants like saints — not metaphorically, not coyly, but full-tilt baroque: chiaroscuro lighting, Renaissance poses, the kind of reverence once reserved for martyrs and monarchs. His migrants aren’t statistics. They’re sacred.
And for that, he’s been crucified.
Not by critics, but by the same folks who hang crosses from their mirrors and scream about “values” while voting to criminalize compassion.
Biblical Realism in the Age of ICE
In 2020, Gonzalez’s Immigrants Crossing the Border Wall Into South Texas was named a finalist at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. It shows a family mid-crossing: a man clutches a child, a woman carries a baby in a sling. Hands reaching. Bodies climbing. Faces praying. (photo below)
The lighting is divine. The brushwork, reverent. It could be the Flight into Egypt, the Crucifixion, the Deposition — but updated. ICE instead of centurions. South Texas instead of Golgotha.
The reaction? Predictable as a Fox News chyron:
“Woke.” “Divisive.” “Propaganda.”
Translation: empathy is illegal here.
The Light That Exposes
Gonzalez’s obsession with light began on a ranch in rural Mexico, where kerosene lamps replaced electricity and Rembrandt danced on adobe walls. He doesn’t paint with glow. He paints with exposure. His light doesn’t comfort — it convicts.
It’s the kind of light border agents use to flush out bodies in the dark.
It’s the kind of light González uses to remind you those bodies have souls.
Jesus, Without Papers
Imagine Jesus at the border: sandals dusty, robe weathered, no passport, just stories and scars. ICE moves in. Riot shields. spears or Tasers. Brass armor or Tactical gear. One agent asks,
“Do you have papers?”
“I am the Word,” he replies.
They arrest him anyway.
The crowd cheers.
They wear red hats. They quote scripture. They mistake cruelty for conviction.
This isn’t a metaphor. This is a mirror.
In a country allergic to nuance, empathy is contraband.
Let’s keep smuggling it in.
Well, that’s today’s little morsel.
Next Edition is Little Morsel #5: The River That Forgot Its Name (also written before Charlie Kirk shooting)
— The Baker (Photo of painting below: The White House identified the piece titled Refugees Crossing the Border Wall into South Texas as one of the artworks and exhibitions it deemed objectionable. Rigoberto A. Gonzalez)
