TERRIBLE INDIFFERENCE

TERRIBLE INDIFFERENCE

Elie Weisel wrote:

“In a sense, be indifferent to suffering is what dehumanizes humans. After all, indifference is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Sometimes anger can be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony. One creates something special for the sake of humanity, because we are angry at the injustice we witness. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. We fight it. We denounce it complaints. We disarm it.

Indifference admits no response. Indifference is not a response. Indifference is not a beginning, it is the end. Therefore, indifference is always our enemy’s friend, for it benefits the aggressor, never the victim, whose pain is intensified when they feel forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees… Not answering to their pain and relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human condition. And in denying their humanity we betray our own also.

Therefore, indifference is not just a sin. It is also a punishment.”

It is all well said about indifference in this short passage. In the morass of what we are experiencing, we can not be indifferent to any moral misery, to any economic misery.

We can not be indifferent to the scam of the “Preferred Stock” that has generated the ruin of many families who have come to losing everything in a breach of trust, in a violation perpetrated with malice, or the evictions done and leaving people without the protection of a home that was acquired for the price of gold, without being worth what it cost, and where the banks always wins, or the so-called Employment ‘ERES’ (euphemism for massive firings, as they should be called), or the so-called tax havens (that should be called Collectors of fraudsters and thieves), nor ignominy around us in the form of corruption and perversion of the most basic principles of ethical human, of being people for the right.

We can not be indifferent to lies, torture, abuse, pain, suffering, theft, misery, really. Because indifference allows the perpetrator to continue killing and destroying with  vengeance and impunity.

What can we do? A thousand things. Support, denounce, inform, promote, display, educate, train, try to change the system from within and from outside. But do change. Bring to light what is in the shade. Each of us, how little or much we have, we can and we know.

Indifference is death. It’s that simple.

Hugs and kisses,

Álex

 

P.S. Elie Weisel is Professor of Humanities at Boston University and has been president of the American Council for the Holocaust. In 1986 he received the Nobel Peace Prize. He was born on September 30, 1928 in Sighet, Transivania, now part of Romania. He lived during the Holocaust, and even as a child, was into forced labor, starvation and torture. His father died in Buchenwald death camp because of malnutrition, cold and dysentery. His mother and sisters were killed in the death camp of Auschwicz, where he was also deported. He has written essays, plays, short stories and novels.

The above excerpt has been taken from his speech in the U.S. Congress in April 1999 and was developed from the experiences he had lived in pain, oppression, torture and death of loved ones.

eliewieselfoundation.org

Alex Rovira