The Witness Chronicles, 12/30/24

Unity vs indifference

The Globalization of Indifference

The Pope said it and he got it right

I was watching a Sixty Minutes interview with Pope Francis when he talked about indifference to the suffering of others, specifically regarding refugees. The phrase in my title struck me as being exactly what is going on here in the US.

I have called it willful ignorance, but I think the Pope got it more accurately and that is even more damning. Indifference means simply not caring about our fellow humans. In other words, abandoning compassion. Which seems to me a serious threat to humanity.

These days, in American politics, the right has gone beyond indifference and preaches the path of not just indifference, but open hate, which is an entirely different thing, a very dangerous thing. It goes beyond simply not caring and into actively hating and fearing anything different. Fear and hate paralyze us as humans and open the door for those who would take power only for themselves.

As a Buddhist, the core belief in our practice is compassion, especially for those we fear or might even come to hate. It is a dead end, the end of being human and engaged in the world.

I’ll be honest, while a man like Donald Trump can stir up that kind of anger, I’m not buying it and I’m not buying the notion that we are at each other’s throats these days. Yes, we have sociopaths and they have taken power, but when we get one on one with others we seldom burst out into hate for a person we don’t know. Most of us see a person first, not a monster.

As I’ve written recently, my revelation lately is that unity is the message that could drive a resistance to the evil that has entered American politics. This evil has been there in the past. The Civil War with one side defending slavery, the American First movement of the 1930s where we risked facism, now being revived by Trump, and the destructive paranoia of Joe McCarhy in the 1950s.

The lies we were told about the war in Vietnam by those we called leaders.

We survived all of those things though it was not easy. The Civil War was one of the deadliest conflicts in all of human history. America First exposed the world to the possibility, very real, of Adolph Hitler’s Germany winning world domination. McCarthy temporarily paralyzed dissent in America and ruined many illustrious careers and lives for nothing more than one man’s greed for power.

All of these things occurred when we lost compassion for our fellow men. We are once more in danger of that but so far I am not seeing it. The open arrogance of those about to take power is an extremely vulnerable weakness and they are doubling down on it. And, historically, they overstep their perceived mandate and people start to turn on them.

The Trump administration is not even officially in power yet and they are already overstepping and openly discarding many of the policies they claimed were important, including the widespread deportation of all illegal immigrants and addressing price gouging on things all of us are affected by daily, like food prices.

This is where the arrogance starts to hurt them. And the arrogance comes from extremely rich guys, basically dickheads, and most people don’t like those type of guys.

Indifference is destroyed by passion. And passions were unleashed in this recent election, on both sides. But the Democrats need to widen their passion to invite rather than restrict. So far they are not yet realizing this, but that may change when we realize we have more power and passion than we thought.

What can we do as individuals to exercise that power? There has been a lot of frustration, paralyzing frustration, after the election shock. That is a good sign. For now we can only watch and talk and gradually determine what is really important to us as humans, to remind ourselves that we have values that are critical to being human.

Indifference is not one of them, it is the absence and abandonment of principles and values. That is what those seeking power hope for. But indifference is not stable because we are, by nature, passionate creatures. If you doubt that, look at what we have collectively accomplished. The world we live in was built by passion, not by checking out.

Tired of politics? I’ve revived my personal growth newsletter, The Remarkable, as a place where I can write about some of the good stuff in life. Check it out!

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