I have not been paying enough attention to the news, as tends to happen, but it’s been even worse lately due to a sense of guilt for not revising or cramming or finishing coursework. And so the sanity of the world just seems like a not-so-urgent matter compared to the dread of entering that exam hall and facing the possibility of failing. Yet, one cannot always revise and so instead of paying attention to anything else, I’ve been reading constantly for the past three weeks.

The result is that I don’t really understand what is going on in Iran after the elections, and I don’t know what happened in Sri Lanka after the government tried to wipe out the Tamil Tigers, but I do know that Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself and that Virginia Woolf decided that someone would have to die so the living would appreciate their lives more. But then I discussed it with a friend and I realised that Virginia Woolf was wrong. We feel regretful and disheartened but we do not appreciate it more – we don’t because most of us go straight from the dark where we face the hole of non-existence, to the light where the hole needs to be covered up by acceptance; and do not dwell in the grey area where the fight is, where the understanding is; and without understanding how could ever appreciate it more? I would say this is where apathy comes from.

My friend was reading Heat at the time and I couldn’t help making the connection. Anyone can plainly see the fatalities of climate change – we’ve been told, we know that people do die because of it. However when confronting the fact of their deaths what happens is that we go straight from gloominess to acceptance, and then the fight is lost. And it is not that we accept that it is alright for them to die; accepting is not the same as condoning, but most of us simply accept their deaths because there is a lot of complexity in understanding what caused them to die or what could have prevented them from dying. We delay or downright refuse the understanding sometimes for the same reasons that kept me from looking properly at the news about massive riots in Iran and genocide in Sri Lanka, because I was revising and not failing this semester just seemed much more urgent.

Tags: apathy

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 17th, 2009 at 2:19 pm and is filed under A Day in the Life Of..., Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.