Why Aren't You Outraged?

¡Hola! Everybody...
No foreplay today.

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-=[ Moral Outrage ]=-

On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was murdered near her home. Her neighbors were fully aware of the struggle between Genovese and her attacker, which lasted nearly thirty minutes in length, yet were unresponsive (later research disclosed that the actual events of that night were misreported). The failure of the neighbors to come to her aid is now known as the bystander effect. It refers to the phenomenon in which the greater the numbers of people present, the less likely people are to help a person in crisis. When an emergency situation occurs, observers are more likely to take action if there are few or no other witnesses. It’s as if in a large crowd, everyone is expecting someone else to do something, so no one acts.

I’m no hero -- by no stretch of the imagination. In fact, I am as far removed from “hero” as is possible. I do have a problem, however. For the life of me, I cannot stay quiet in the face of injustice. If I see something that’s just plain wrong, I can’t let it go, I can’t stay quiet. I have to act. Throughout my life, I have paid a steep price for that character defect.

But, no, I am no hero...

For me, real heroes are spiritual warriors who are alive with moral outrage and who enter the gladiatorial arena to wrestle with the mystery of evil in its many different disguises. Fierce men and women, rich in wise judgment, who still have thunder and lightning in them. Not the middle-of-the-road fence sitters these people. Give me the “hot” Bill Moyers (or Rachel Maddow!) who takes chances, calls presidents liars, and breathes fire at secret wars and hidden government over any of the “cool” stenographers who report the news and lead discussions as long as the perspectives expressed won’t keep them from access to the very power they should be holding accountable.

One of the most troubling issues of today is the absence of moral outrage in the American public. The ongoing revelations of wars justified by fabricated lies, government-sanctioned torture on American soil and abroad, corporate malfeasance, arranged assassinations, the shredding of the Constitution, are greeted with an apathy that is utterly mind-numbing. It is as if the whole of the American populace is under the thrall of a collective bystander effect.

While we might have freedom of the (corporate-owned) press, I am continually astounded by how our media can report on the most egregious forms of political and corporate corruption but very little happens. We have a former vice president going on talk shows and bragging about how he ordered torture!

To be sure, the path of the warrior is full of conflict and contradictions. No individual with an awakened sense of moral reasoning can witness unnecessary suffering, disease, and injustice without feeling outraged and being compelled toward action. Desecration evokes a feeling from deep in the gut that forms into a judgment and grows into an impulse to act.

Godammit it, it’s wrong for governments to spend billions on weapons when tens of thousands are dying needlessly from disease and hunger!

Fuck! It’s wrong to pursue a demented progress at the cost of destroying our planet!

Godammit! It’s wrong to pass a law that criminalizes people of a certain skin color!

If our minds and hearts haven’t been anesthetized, we must be outraged by the injustices of the world and realize that if “you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.” You have to have a mission in life, something sacred, larger than your petty needs. It is our responsibility to become protectors of this world, of the powerless, and healers of the broken.

These are challenging times for those aspiring to live with compassion and vigor. You have to gird your fucking loins and decide where to enter the struggle against unnecessary suffering, injustice, and poverty.

Suffering is a fact of the human condition. In the best of all possible worlds, there would still be disease, accident, tragedy, disappointment, loneliness, and death. And there is a certain form of wisdom required in order to accept the things we are powerless to change. But there is suffering and then there is what we add to it. There is another form of wisdom that allows us address the suffering that results from psychological, economic, and political structures that we can change. While I do not subscribe to violent “just wars,” there is a just war of the soul that is against unnecessary suffering, against the impulses of greed, the collective lack of empathy, against those systemic mechanisms that are clearly responsible for the desecration of the earth and the dehumanization of people.

But identifying the enemy is always a dangerous exercise. Self-righteousness can easily come to dominate our judgments. It’s easy to condemn pollution while we continue to use a gas-guzzler to go the corner store. In order to guard against self-righteousness, I have to remind myself constantly that I am part of the problem I am trying to solve. I embody many of the wrongs I must fight. For example, as a man, I have a tendency to view the world from a male-dominated perspective. As a straight man, I have to be vigilant of any bias I have regarding my gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. The demons of greed, cruelty, and fear must be fought from within and without.

The collective bystander effect-- heart that has become hardened -- is both individual and systemic, both mine and my enemy’s. The moral outrage that sets me at odds with institutional embodiments of evil also sets me in conflict with my own greed and apathy. A person who does not know how to fight a just fight, first within and then with others, has no values worth defending, no ideals worth aspiring to, no awareness of the disease of which he might be healed.

And nobody -- at least nobody with some cojones -- worships the status quo.

We may not be heroes, but we all owe it to ourselves and to others to become warriors of the soul. And when we become warriors, we do so with the knowledge that the battle is never to be won intellectually or politically. There is no answer, no methodology, no way of understanding that eliminates the harm evil poses to the human spirit. We do not live in a world that satisfies our demand for moral explanations. But it also true that I, and few others, know what must be done, if not to reduce oppression, at least not add to it. Perhaps we cannot prevent being in a world where the rights of our fellow human beings aren’t violated. But we can reduce the number of those being violated and dehumanized.

If you’re not feeling outraged today, you have lost your very soul, or whatever it is that makes you human...

-- Eddie