No one cares about apathy

Image from Conner's Conundrums

A few days a go I put up a post in the form of a youtube video that I came across.

The video was a news clip broadcast on Russia TV news. The footage was taken off a CCTV across a busy Turkish Highway and showed an infant crawling off the curb alongside the busy road and try to cross as cars went apathetically by.

I had commented in the post that I found it staggering (okay, I used 'amazing') how some people seem to be isolated in their own little island of contentment and are only moved when it concerns them personally.

From where I stand, watching the world as it goes about its business, more and more people seem to believe that things do not concern them anymore if they can just look away.

A reader of the aforementioned post commented that “it's the world we are building,” adding that that the world we are building “is restricted to the plasma screen of our entertainment. A world that erases our basic compassion.”

I had been thinking about this state that we find ourselves in, and came to the conclusion that human conditioning through competition has come at the high cost of human compassion.

But there is more...

The world is in turmoil at this moment. More turmoil than we have every witnessed before – recent history was that of the cold war. Even in the height of such polarised circumstances the world at large was not embroiled in so much turmoil.

Not since the 1990s, just before the US first invaded Iraq, has there been some semblance of peace in the world. Desert Storm brought US forces permanently onto Saudi soil and in-ostensibly gave birth to Al Qaeda and spearheaded the power of Osama bin Laden.

Since then turmoil has been exported from the US in the name of 'freedom' and 'liberty.' The US that supported and armed the Taliban against its one time cold war foe Russia in the 1980s now looked upon these same people as the enemy. I had once read in a magazine some years ago (I can't seem to source it at the moment) that it was the US that instigated the Mujahideen to instigate a Jihad against the Russians – the first time a muslim population rose to the task in centuries.

If it is true, this sort of manipulation and propaganda by the world's sole superpower has played a significant role in the heated environment in the world. The Arab Spring that birthed in Tunisia has spread across the region and into other countries governed by dictators (who have been able to hold office for decades with the tacit approval of the US).

The US, the self-professed protector of democracy and the voice of the people, has only now begun to take the side of the poplar protests because it knows that to do otherwise would undermine its moral superiority in the world architecture.

Thankfully the US government and the US people are not one and the same. However, most US citizens have been lulled into a sense of complacency and apathy by the comforts and security that the their government has given them. This is, of course, not a bad thing.

The US government has provided the best to its citizens and should be applauded. However, in doing so and propagating its influence into the rest of the world to ensure that superiority and safety for its citizens (to say nothing of maintaining a clean supply line for cheap oil) the government has also put their very security in the line of fire.

But I digress. It is in this polarised world we live in today that people rather than borrow a cup of sugar from their neighbours now report them to the authorities on suspicion of terrorist tendencies. People are being taught that it is no longer safe to trust your neighbours. People are moving away from helping each other for fear that getting involved could inadvertently link them to some sort of subversive act.

We are living in a world that a foreign-looking woman with a heavy bag is first marked as a terrorist in disguise and carrying a bomb; a man who absentmindedly forgets to pick his duffel bag up before he exits the subway car is marked and reported immediately.

Distrust and constant suspicion is a terrible way to live; and apathy suddenly becomes the only island for the sane.