Indifference

I am obsessively routine. This past Sunday, exactly thirty minutes before services, I parked where I always do, walked into church, sat in the same spot on the same pew that has been my place for about twenty years, and jotted down the exact time in my diary. Then I copied a quote from the church bulletin that, appropriate for this time of year, was about gratefulness.

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The quote set me to wondering … do my routine ways create within me a sense of ungratefulness and an attitude of indifference? Satan must love indifference. He knows that all human beings succumb to it occasionally, and in my case, he succeeds more often than I like to admit in using it to replace one of its opposites: thankfulness.

“The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy; it’s indifference. The opposite of life is not death; it’s indifference.”

Holocaust survivor Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel once said, “The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy; it’s indifference. The opposite of life is not death; it’s indifference.” Wiesel was just one of the countless millions of Jews slated for extermination by the indifferent monsters in power during Adolf Hitler’s satanic reign. Scholars estimate that approximately six million innocent men, women, and children were eliminated to satiate the Fuhrer’s thirst for genocide. At the Dachau prison camp near Munich, Germany, I saw the results of this cruel indifference. All through the prison, mural-sized photographs covered walls. In them, cadaverous, half-dead people were being tortured in ways that sane human beings could never imagine. What I saw was seared indelibly in my memory. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the torture devices, gas chambers, crematoria, and the so-called blood ditches, where Gestapo officers used shaven heads for target practice. The living victims, their heads painted with large red crosses, were laid on the upward side of the ditch. For weeks afterwards, that sight gave me nightmares. Wiesel might concur that, to greater and lesser degrees, the opposite of all that is good in this world God created for His children is indifference. For me, one of those Dachau photographs confirms this. In the mural, a German soldier sat behind a machine gun on one side of a huge, freshly dug grave. Smoking a cigarette, he looked bored, indifferent. On the other side, another soldier, equally indifferent, straddled a bulldozer. Marched into the pit, prisoners knew what was about to happen. An officer with a megaphone announced that those who survived the first fusillade of bullets should wave their hands and the machine gunner would finish them off before the bulldozer pushed dirt over their bodies. Wiesel survived the death camps, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1986. How he came to terms with the horror and indifference he witnessed, I will never know. I do know this: On Thanksgiving Day, I will sit down with loved ones, and, as always, lead the group in prayer. In this year’s prayer, I will include Wiesel’s words: “The opposite of love is not hate … it’s indifference.”