Apathy's toll

A woman bludgeons her pregnant friend, rips the fetus from the womb with scissors, kidnaps her other three children, drowns them and leaves their corpses to rot in the washer and dryer. A man uses MySpace to stalk six high school girls, takes them hostage in their school and proceeds to sexually assault each of them, before shooting one in the head and committing suicide. If these events in the past week haven't stopped you in your tracks and made you question your comfortable niche in the world, then you're either inhuman or numb. \nI would guess that most people who heard about these tragedies on the news responded in earnest with "Oh Lord, how sad," or "Wow, what a sicko," etc. So we all agree that the above scenarios are far beyond the limits of functioning within our society, but it would be naive to believe that these acts are isolated incidents of a handful of sick people. \nIn the same week as the aforementioned deranged acts, murders happened in Detroit, New York and all major centers of population concentration. In the same week, drunk-driving deaths occurred, foster abuses went undocumented and immigrants, legal and illegal, were deprived of basic human necessities so someone could make a buck. In the same week, soldiers were killed in Iraq, babies were slaughtered in Darfur, women in various places were guilted into accepting the fault for their rape and we didn't bat an eyelash. \nWe accept the murders in urban areas, the average amount of domestic violence and the death toll of war because that's "just what happens." We, as a society, are numb to ordinary hatred, to ordinary acts of desperation. We are so overloaded with information, overwhelmed by the immensity of average tragedy, that our brains have had to turn off to protect ourselves from despair. It is only when something bizarre happens in our immediate reality that we are shaken from normalcy. \nI have been desperate this week to try to find a scapegoat for these particular instances of brutality. It would be easy to blame media sensationalism, violent video games, movies and music, violence in the form of war, the government's mismanaged funds and misdirected programs for the ugly parts of society. The list of possible easy excuses could go on for pages, but these issues are symptoms of a much deeper social disease. We are an apathetic (read: pathetic) people. With our cell phones, iPods and Internet, we have more technology than ever to be better connected, but instead we are as fragmented and self-absorbed as we ever were. To combat social problems we must first recognize that the suffering of others is not in a separate sphere. We must have compassion for the "other" and realize how amazingly privileged we are. If we won't sacrifice some of our own comfort to alleviate suffering, then we should expect more bad news because it won't get any better without a cooperative willingness to work for justice.