These past few months we have all heard about the flu epidemic and other illnesses sweeping through the nation. One epidemic we don’t hear about — or care about — as much is apathy.
Anyone who has taken a psychology or sociology class should be familiar with the concept of the diffusion of responsibility. A crowd of people witness a fatal car crash and one of the passengers is severely injured. A person standing in the crowd reaches for their phone but decides they don’t need to call 911. They think the person next to them will do it, since they saw the crash too.
This chain reaction of believing someone else will step forward to help, to say something or to take responsibility, continues until the injured person is dead because no one called an ambulance.
While situations like the above don’t happen on a daily basis, there is this deep-seated attitude of apathy and diffusion of responsibility in this country. If something impactful happens how many people stand up to say something about it?
Looking through older editions of the Branding Iron I’ve seen entire pages filled with letters to the editor from students. True, we had physically bigger pages then, but certainly not a smaller student body.
I try to tell myself that people are speaking out in other ways like online. Some do express frustration and air their concerns about current events happening on local and national levels. Others complain that traffic was terrible or the lines at the grocery store were too long.
I’m not trying to dismiss the smaller problems and inconveniences we all experience. Instead of complaining about something, take action or think of possible solutions. Instead of thinking something isn’t important because it doesn’t apply to you, stop and think about the fact there others who exist outside your bubble.
One of the best examples I’ve seen recently is letters to the editor here at the Branding Iron nowadays. We get maybe one each week. Like I said before, there used to be whole pages dedicated to people voicing their opinion, speaking out about how they saw people being affected or what should be done to alleviate problems.
When was the last time you saw something and thought “Hey, that’s not a great thing that’s happening, something should be done”?
Don’t think that something isn’t your problem because it hasn’t directly affected you yet. Don’t think that you can’t make others aware or that you’re powerless to help create change.
I’m not advocating that everyone become superheroes and solve all the world’s problems. But speaking up, saying something and taking even small actions can be impactful.
We’ve lost a lot of things as a society because we chose not to care. We decided that some things like extinct species, dead languages, restrictive legislation weren’t immediately affecting us enough to say or do anything about it.
Who knows what we may lose in the future as scientists show data of global warming reaching a critical point and nations continue to squabble over nuclear technology and economic embargoes.
We need to consider what we’re willing to lose in our apathetic stupor. Because if we don’t care enough to make a change and speak up, then who will?
