|
Today's
Meditation:
Evil isn't
necessarily the kind of awfulness that we associate with
supernatural beings. Sometimes it's right here at
home, defined as "profoundly immoral and
wicked." And apathy is its partner in many
cases, because apathetic people tend not to care what's
going on around them, or they care but do nothing to fight
the evil that they see. Heck, they don't even do
anything to support the good. Apathy is one of the
major causes of social dysfunction that we have, for
apathy allows the rise of those who want to sabotage other
people-- and those who want to do this are certainly not
apathetic, but extremely active for the most part.
Sometimes
apathy is disguised as fatalism: my efforts won't
have any effect, so why bother? The truth is,
though, that we'll often never really know if and how our
actions do have effects. Perhaps the person we
inspire to action will run for public office one day, and
have a tremendous effect. Perhaps our words will
convince someone else to vote a different way. When
we're fatalistic, we're just giving ourselves an excuse to
make no effort at all.
Terrible
things do happen on our planet, no matter how positively
we try to view our world. But the antidote to evil
is not inaction, for that inaction allows the evil to
continue unabated, and we become accomplices to the bad
things that are happening. And we don't want
that. Even if our influence is very small and
seemingly insignificant, we need to do all that we can to
work for the good-- which means working against the
evil. On any level that we can, in any ways that we
can.
Let's
not let apathy become our guiding force. Rather,
let's be active and aware and alert, so that when bad
things do arise, we can be on the side that's working to
eradicate them rather than on the side that just doesn't
care that these bad things are going to have terrible
consequences for many living things on our planet.
Apathy will eat us up inside, even as it pretends to be
keeping us in a comfortable, conflict-free world.
The harm that it can do us makes it worth the effort to
keep it out of our lives.
|
