Many of the wonderful ways that people have captured this most stifling of things:
“We’ve forgotten much. How to struggle, how to rise to dizzy heights and sink to unparalleled depths. We no longer aspire to anything. Even the finer shades of despair are lost to us. We’ve ceased to be runners. We plod from structure to conveyance to employment and back again. We live within the boundaries that science has determined for us. The measuring stick is short and sweet. The full gamut of life is a brief, shadowy continuum that runs from gray to more gray. The rainbow is bleached. We hardly know how to doubt anymore. (“The Thing”)”
― Richard Matheson, Collected Stories, Vol. 1
***
Monument Circle, 2004 by Brian Burmeister
12:03, in front of great stone
soldiers and sailors,
cars go round and round.
A group of ten people stand
together, at the steps of the gray,
limestone tower, over a hundred years old.
Most of them hold white signs,
with simple block text:
PRAY FOR DARFUR 1 PM.
A few cars honk or wave,
most passersby on foot pick up
their pace, drop heads.
At 12:04, one couple walks up,
in their sixties,
still holding hands,
asks a sunglassed college girl,
holding a sign,
“Who is Darfur?”
***
“Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.”
― Hannah Arendt
***
“Apathy is a trap. There is no challenge… so there is no reward. Remember, there is always free cheese in a mousetrap.”
― Steve Maraboli
***
“Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.”
― Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right
***
The Cult of Apathy – Karlo Sevilla
The unleashed predators roam and preach:
a spade is a club is a diamond is a heart.
A few brave untruths and inclement weather,
march and sing outside roofs and walls.
Most watch, sleep, dream inside
flimsy shelters of sticks and straw.
All gazed at azure half of sky,
when behind rumbled a gathering storm.
Now the plagues will not just pass us by;
we are untethered on a slippery edge.
Perhaps they’ll cut us all to pieces,
but we shall forever hold our peace.
There’s convenience in indifference,
and cold comfort trumps conscience.
resistance words 