Caring

The keynote speaker at the graduation I attended at Bucknell University in May was none other than the writer, activist, Nobel Prize winner and Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel. I was very impressed that this was who they got to speak. The emphasis in all the speeches that had come before was service and leadership, as in, 'this is what your education at Bucknell has been preparing you for, service and leadership.' Wiesel's talk touched lightly on these ideas also, but his big theme was one he has expounded on in many of his previous speeches: as you go through life it is important above all to avoid indifference. As he said, "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of beauty is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, but indifference between life and death."

Heavily accented (which somewhat surprised me – after all these years?), his was not a fiery, or even a particularly dynamic speech, but it was moving and powerful, not least, I'm sure, because of the experiences of the man, that we in the audience were all aware of. They gave heft to what he had to say. An inner voice was whisper-ing, "This guy knows what he's talking about." He described how he and his fellow prisoners in the concentration camp took a tiny solace from the idea that of course the rest of the world must not know where they were and what was being done to them, or surely the world would have long since rushed to their rescue. It would have been unbearable to think that the world did know, and was doing nothing. That level of indifference from their fellow men would have made their suffering far worse.

Just tonight there was on PBS a show on the folk singer Pete Seeger. What the program demonstrated was that Seeger determinedly lived his life according to Wiesel's principal: he was never indifferent. He cared – about racial discrimination, about the plight of exploited workers, later about ending the Viet Nam war and bringing home the soldiers – and he used his music to try to bring about change in those areas. He also believed strongly that Americans had a right to their own political and religious beliefs, and to privacy in those beliefs. He therefore refused to answer questions about those things before the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in 1955, and that stand ultimately got him a prison sentence (overturned on a technicality), as well as being blacklisted, which prevented him from appearing on commercial television until those subversives, the Smothers Brothers, had him on their show in 1967 (good ol' PBS had allowed him to have a shortlived program of folk music in the mid-60s). He and the group he had helped found, The Weavers, were also black-listed from the radio for several years. But he sang on, he never gave up, he never stopped caring.

I have great admiration for people like this. Elie Wiesel endured horrific suffering in his youth and has spent the rest of his life trying to see to it that others should not suffer in the same way. Seeger spent his life trying to use that which he loved most – making music – to help others, relieve the suffering of others, support justice and fair play.

I have noticed in myself over the past few years an increase in that sense of indifference that Weisel warns against. I see it as a kind of withdrawal from life. At times it dismays me; at other times, I fear I am...indifferent. It may be that my inability to manage my life in a (to me) satisfactory way has made me feel, oh what's the point. I have never been what you would call an optimist, and it may be that my natural pessimism has gotten the better of me. How do we make ourselves care, when we don't really care?