War on Indifference

On January 20th, Barack Obama gave his inaugural address. His delivery was more somber than fiery, but in terms of content, it rates as one of the greatest speeches in history.  One line in particular stands out for me.

And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders

Indifference.  What is indifference?  On April, 12th 1999, Elie Weisel, holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate, gave another of the world’s greatest speeches entitled, “The Perils of Indifference”

In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony, one does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response. Indifference is not a response.

Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor — never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees — not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own.

Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment. And this is one of the most important lessons of this outgoing century’s wide-ranging experiments in good and evil.

You can listen to the entire speech here.