The power of apathy

On a recent Air Canada flight, I sat in front of a group of Cenovus oil rig workmen. Before take-off, two of the workmen proceeded to viciously kick me in the back, calling me a raghead. They yelled, ordering me to give the passengers sufficient notice should I decide to bomb the plane. Biting my tongue, I chalked their behaviour up to ignorance. I placed my computer bag between my back and their well-placed kicks and noted that not a single person on my flight spoke up.

The seven original sins are a classification of our collective human vices. But as Eleanor Roosevelt, former US First Lady, so potently put it, “so much attention is paid to the aggressive sins, such as violence and cruelty and greed with all their tragic effects that too little attention is paid to the passive sins, such as apathy ... which in the long run can have a more devastating effect.” Apathy is not one of the original sins. It could be argued that the most dangerous human quality is actually apathy — bereft of conviction, not from an individual’s lack of awareness, but from an utter disdain bred of sheer complacency.

Apathy will extinguish the preciousness associated with life if all one feels is the softness of their skin. Americans endlessly debate whether liberty is a treasured constitutional right or is it something fundamentally different today. Does security edge out the timeless principle of liberty — dispensing with the refrain of the ‘land of the free’ and substituting it with the ‘homeland of the secure’? The recent controversy surrounding a class taught by the US military underlines the pervasiveness of our societal apathy. The class instructor taught students that Islam must change or the United States “will facilitate its self-destruction”, ultimately bombing Islam’s two holy cities of Makkah and Medina, not unlike Hiroshima and Dresden. Only recently was the class terminated when a student objected to the course material. Apathy best epitomises those officers, cycled through this class over two years, who never felt obliged to tell anyone how wrong all this was.

Apathy will also extinguish the significance of faith if all one feels are hands clasped tightly in prayer. There are many Muslims, who have been inculcated — told if all they do is focus on daily prayers, all their problems will disappear. There are also those Muslims who have been led to believe that they should renounce this material world. They will only find happiness in an afterlife amidst frolicking women and rivers of milk. With such conviction, who then, from amongst the Muslim community, will speak for the hundreds of Muslim Shiites who were murdered in recent months in Pakistan? It seems that Muslims are more interested in flogging Uncle Sam than speaking out against banned extremist groups that stop passenger buses to execute all those identified as Shiites.

The word ‘liberty’ is defined as ‘free from compulsion’. Once any government legally empowers itself to compel their citizens, then liberty, as an ideal principle, vanishes — never to return. In our post 9/11 world, having to choose between liberty and security is wrong. Those politicians who sacrifice liberty in the hopes of greater security deserve neither and will get none. Conversely, people of faith need to make some important choices. They need to take full accountability for their religious beliefs. It is difficult to have a moderate position because once faith is ceded to a religious clergy, it will invariably be bandied about at each and every street corner.

Apathy finds itself in our lives intersecting it in surprising ways. The ensuing plot is ultimately tragic, but should every citizen pull his or her own weight, their voice would add a genuine dose of humanity to these most outrageous of stories.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 4^th, 2012.