I am about to be a hypocrite.
I promised I would get to apathy, constant reader, and I alwayskeep my promises. So let's talk, you and I, about what frightensme.
Beyond war, beyond murder, torture, atomic bombs and MarthaStewart, the thing that terrifies me, sends me screaming to thehills, tearing at my hair and gibbering like one of H. P.Lovecraft's unfortunate protagonists, is apathy.
Better known as "not giving a damn," for those of you who arescratching your heads right about now, apathy is the complete andutter negation of anything which might ever have motivated you tocare.
Doesn't exactly sound like a world-shaking catastrophe, I know,but bear with me. War, famine, plague, death, all of them bring-along with the obvious consequences- renewal of purpose, forging ofbonds between family, friends, country, a cause to believe in, anda cause to fight for or against, hope, life and change. Not unlikea forest fire. Bad at the time, but ultimately vital in the chainof life and death.
But.
The only reason war, famine, death and destruction don't wipe usout, the only reason they don't stamp us into the ground like fivebillion pesky cockroaches, is our will to live. We care. We give adamn. You take that away, and we're already dead. Think about it.What if no one thought it was worth the trouble to rebuild thecities, to care for the wounded, to raise their children or tofight disease? How fast would we wink out of existence, one morecasualty on this great spinning golgotha of a planet?
Consider the case of Kitty Genovese. In the spring of 1964,Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was attacked and stabbed by an assailantas 38 people watched from their apartment buildings. Catherinescreamed for help, but no one moved to help her or call the police.Several minutes later, her attacker returned, sexually assaultedher, stabbed her to death and took 49 dollars from her wallet. Noone ever tried to stop him. No one ever called the police.
It's called the Bystander Effect, and it's basically an advancedversion of "ignore it, maybe it will go away," or what DouglasAdams once called the Somebody Else's Problem field. Nobody wantsto deal with something as messy as saving some poor kid's life.
I said, at the beginning of this column, that I was going to bea hypocrite, and I have. I'm no better or no more immune. Honestly,I sympathize with the idea: apathy is, after all, much, much easierthan giving a damn. It's easier to beat a child than to teach one.It's easier to drink yourself into oblivion than to deal with theworld. Simple.
You are not immune to it. I am not immune to it. And oncesociety that has forgotten what war, famine, death, and destructionmean, and what their consequences are, it's all too easy to slidedown into that warm, comforting void of nothingness, and wait fordeath.
There are plenty of people who would be happy to do all yourthinking for you, to take away everything you ever fought for,everything you ever believed in and anything you ever had, whileyou sit in front of the television and ignore the world ... andwait for it to go away.
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