Indifference

Indifference

by Marco M. Pardi

“The know-nothings are less of a problem than the feel-nothings.” Anonymous

“The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them,but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.” George Bernard Shaw. The Devil’s Disciple.

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Do you know anyone who claims to be indifferent to current events and developments? Or, should I ask, How many people do you know who claim to be indifferent? Are you such a person? If so, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is you won’t know what hit you; the bad news is you won’t know what hit you.

I know some people who, for various reasons, adopt an indifferent attitude toward most things going on around them. Some are data experts on sports, but struggle to name their U.S. Senators. Others claim to be too busy with “staying ahead of the game”, though I’ve not heard what that game is. But the ones that do irritate me are those that claim to be spiritually above the mundane concerns of temporal life. Seems to me they’ve conflated aloof with aloft. I’m tempted to say what I’ve heard said to people who criticize the U.S.: If you don’t like it here, leave.

Of course, the indifference phenomenon is nothing new. We will never know its incidence among prehistoric cultures simply because they didn’t record history. But we can safely surmise that certain principles have always held. We have found through experience that it is a rare individual who, no matter how well equipped, can simply march into the wilderness, never looking back, and survive long before dissolving into crippling mental illness. Among early religious hermits this was known as Divine Madness. But more common examples are found among people who simply do not bother to vote, even when there is nothing stopping them. Lately, a faction of the population claims, with zero evidence, that the system is rigged. Have they, people who apparently jumped for the out of reach grapes too many times, never read the fable?

The often myopic narrative presented in the U.S. as History of Western Civilization invests idolatrous value in the democracy of Classical Greece. It can only be supposed the craftsmen behind this Potemkin Village of Athenian democracy we call History are relying on students never being exposed to Greek literature of the time. The readers of this post probably bring Heraclitus to mind. An Ionian of a peculiar orientation of mysticism, Heraclitus was no friend of the common man. Saying, “The Ephesians would do well to hang themselves, every grown man of them…” he espoused that only force would cause someone to act for their own good; “Every beast is driven to the pasture with blows…Asses would rather have straw than gold.” Well, I don’t know what use asses would have for gold but his point does speak to the pandemic of inertia we see on voting days. The United States has one of the lowest, if not the lowest voting participation recorded among democratic nations.

But is simply raising the vote count the answer? There is currently a movement to enact automatic voter registration, applicable when a person reaches their 18^th birthday. Do you think every 18 year old is competent to vote? I don’t. In fact, like Heraclitus I can think of many people I consider incompetent to vote, especially since the 2016 and 2020 Presidential elections “smoked them out”. Resistance to open voting is nothing new in this country. Alexander Hamilton, a “Founding Father”, adamantly wanted to restrict the vote to male landowners and some male owners of major businesses. In modern parlance, he wanted people who had “skin in the game”. That is, they were not indifferent to the outcome.

If you accept the premise that simply turning 18 is not a sufficient qualifier to empower one to vote, what qualifier, or qualifiers, would you stipulate? There are several potential problems with automatic voter registration, or any such registration for 18 year olds. Just out of high school (if they graduated, which many don’t), most are inclined to vote in conformance with their family’s voting history. Where do they get the news and pertinent analyses, if they get them? Facebook? Tic Toc?

Thanks to Fascist-née-Republican policies going back to the Joseph McCarthy era and before, K-12 education has been gutted and denatured to little beyond babysitting and care taking. Making this worse, since the Reagan administration the F/R party has been successfully infiltrating school and library boards nationwide, narrowing textbook and teacher selection/retention and lately enacting sweeping library book bans in schools and communities. Long before Reagan, I remember attending college classes in which instructors would not, and by their admission could not discuss certain topics. This has recently accelerated measurably. And, of course, most 18 year olds have had little experience in a rapidly changing world.

When the voting age was 21 I became eligible as I was nearing the end of the 4^th year of my 6 year tenure in a Strategic Air Command Combat Squadron. I had been to and lived in three continents and several countries, as a civilian and as an airman. I had accumulated 2 years worth of college credit and various awards. Did I feel competent to opine on American domestic issues, environmental issues, financial issues? No.

Indifference is often applied to a variety of targets; Not My Problem is a commonly heard phrase. Yet history holds many examples of dreadful outcomes from that attitude. Athens in the 5^th century BCE (Before the Common Era) reached its zenith of architectural and cultural development yet the aristocratic class ignored the growing disparity of wealth between itself and the hoi poloi, the common man. The result was the overthrow of the aristocracy and the abolishing of many schools. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Khmer Rouge revolution in Cambodia, and Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China shared a common basis: the violent uprising of the uneducated and poorly educated poor against the educated aristocracy. Aristocracies which had ignored them and simply viewed them as unpleasant but necessary laborers. The problems of these lower classes were beneath consideration.

In Cambodia among the aristocratic targets for summary execution were people who wore eyeglasses. The presumption was that they could read, and therefore were oppressors of the common people. In China universities were burned and professors forced to renounce their learning or be murdered. In short, all these societies decapitated themselves.

I trust the reader’s mind has conjured images of January 6^th, the infamous day when a mob different in dress from those above but deeply sharing their values stormed and ransacked the U.S. Capitol. The erection of a scaffold on the Capitol steps was an eerie image of the guillotine which dropped non-stop during the French Revolution. The scaffold was not built from scrap wood lying about and rope conveniently found nearby; it had been designed to be portable, easily transported to the site, and readily assembled. Hang Mike Pence! Was the chant. Malice aforethought is the legal term.

Many ideas purporting to explain the events of January 6^th have been, and still are floating about. Some of them have merit, but the various factors they identify are secondary; they are interesting and varied numerators while the denominator goes unexamined. Perhaps because it comes too close to home. There is little to no mention of the apparent indifference which allowed the rise and the power of each of the factors, such as the proliferation of hate radio, cancerous metastasis of heavily armed “militias” throughout the United States, the unregulated development of a “Wild West” internet replete with lunatic conspiracy theories, the election of an utterly deceitful demagogue, the infiltration of the court system from local to federal levels, States paying cash bounties to people who spy on neighbors, friends, and even close family and report those who may be contemplating abortion, States opening criminal prosecution of those who assist a woman in going to another State for abortion, States opening criminal investigation of miscarriages and prosecuting medical providers who assist when there are potentially life threatening complications, Republican led States passing laws and enacting regulations which make voting access much harder for Democratic districts, Republican State office holders who promise to overturn 2024 election results if they favor Democrats, and ignoring the blatant developments in a major political party which mirror closely the rise of Benito Mussolini’s Fascism and, later, Hitler’s interpretation of Fascism.

All this was done in plain sight, in front of people who could not be bothered to look.

At my age one might say I can now be indifferent. Perhaps I should take the advise of Robert Regan, a Republican candidate for the Michigan House of Representatives, who said he would advise his daughters that if they were about to be raped they should “lie back and enjoy it.” After all, I lived through Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship, I can live through another one. While that may be true, it is also true I still “have skin in the game”, my living descendants. But while each of them is in the top ranks of their fields with very highly portable skills, a surrender of the United States to dictatorship would leave no safe place on this planet. I’ve often heard it said the United States gets the government it deserves. I might be indifferent to that but for the consequences to all other life on this planet.

An interesting slogan arose during the Vietnam war: If you are not saying NO, you’re saying YES.