Every year there is a prefectural speech contest for high school students. Much like the music festivals we used to have in school. Students choose a poem or speech to recite, or they can write their own.
Here is the speech my student has chosen to recite. I commend her.
The Perils of Indifference
Elie Wiesel
What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means "no difference." A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil. What are its courses and inescapable consequences? Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue? Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one's sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?
Of course, indifference can be tempting ---more than that, seductive. 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. It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair.
In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman. Indifference, after all, is more dangerous than anger and hatred. Anger can at times be creative. One writes a great poem, a great symphony. One does something special for the sake of humanity because one is angry at the injustice that one witnesses. But indifference is never creative. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it.
Indifference elicits no response. Indifference in not a response. Indifference is not a beginning; it is an end. And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor ---never his vicitim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. 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.
Indifference, then, is not only a sin, it is a punishment.
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3 comments:
that is totally ridiculous! they should at least get to recite something they can vaguely understand! most english speakers can't even follow that speech! TOTALLY RIDICULOUS!!
yes, I prefer them to do poetry, but she's doing a great job nonetheless, and the more she recited it to me the more I understand it at least....
Crazy speech! However, a more than a few academics - namely Norman Finklestein and Noam Chomsky - have less than nice things to say about Elie Weisel. A holocaust survivor, he has been accused of using the stories of Jewish suffering for his own financial gain. I wonder who would be indifferent to that?
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