The Indifference to Suffering

Bob Herbert, Op-Ed Columnist for the NYT had another gut wrenching, heartbreaking column yesterday. Both he and Nicholas Kristof continue to write about the horror in Dafur, but as Herbert says, the real problem these days is overload. There is a danger that even the most decent of people can grow numb to the unending reports of atrocities occurring all around the globe. Mass rape, mass murder, torture and the institutionalized oppression of women – no one wants to hear about it or read about it.

It’s all too easy to focus on the other things in the world – a ballgame, a graduation, the ballet, a trip to a fun place, happy visits with friends and relatives and the tendency to draw an impenetrable psychic curtain across the worst that the world has to offer is surely understandable. But as Elie Wiesel has cautioned, it’s a tendency that must be fought.

The stories that are told by women in Dafur are so horrendous, the atrocities so unthinkable no one wants to hear them. But Mr. Wiesel has warned us so eloquently about the dangers inherent in indifference to the suffering of others. Stories of atrocities on the scale of those coming out of Darfur cannot be told too often. As he said in a speech at the White House in 1999, “It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes.”

But indifference to the suffering of others “is what makes the human being, inhuman”, he said, adding: “The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees – not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity, we betray our own.”

Go to Darfuriwomen.org. The header says it all -- They Spoke. We Listened. You Respond. Their Voices Must Be Heard.