“Stamp It Out!”
Many years ago, when I was in college, I served in the Student Government Association. We came up with an ingenious campaign to increase student interest and involvement. It was a campaign we cleverly dubbed “Stamp It Out!” We had little buttons made: STAMP IT OUT! We wore them constantly. The idea, of course, was that other students would naturally come up to us and say “Stamp what out?” to which we would enthusiastically cry, “Apathy!” while handing them their very own button to wear. One by one, we would convert them all.
Sadly, most of the students were too apathetic to bother asking. We couldn’t give those lousy buttons away. Gradually, ours, too, ended up in the trash. Apathy is contagious.
I laughed when I saw the first “I Found It” bumper stickers. I knew the idea was to get people to say “Found what?” Sadly, I think “My God Beat Up Your Rottweiler AND Your Honor Student” was a better sell, overall.
What is apathy, exactly? First, let’s examine spirituality. I like the “simpler” definition proposed by Rev. Dr. Case Vink: Spirituality is the affirmation of our essential humanness through our search to be alive and fruitful in meaningful ways. I propose that apathy is our disengagement from spirituality - deliberately or inadvertently brought about through an attempt to avoid feeling pain. It is an inability to feel connected, whole, alive, or meaningful, because in dulling the senses to avoid pain, we dull them to joy and passion as well. Apathy leads us to lapse into “same ol’, same ol’” mentality, when we doubt our meaningfulness or our relevance, because it sets us apart from all it is to be alive. Apathy is a good thing to stamp out, actually. Now, where’d I put those buttons?
If you write with apathy, your reader will know it; they will throw down your book with disgust or nod off after the first few sentences. You cannot shut off all emotion when you write; you must feel something. When your writing makes you cry, or laugh aloud, your connectedness breathes life onto the page. When you are passionate about your subject, your words become a spark to light the darkness.
Reference:
How do we know what is real? Is what we perceive reality, or merely shadows of it? Plato’s Cave suggests that we can throw off the bonds of ignorance, but that we might be so accustomed to the status quo we wouldn’t appreciate or enjoy the resulting enlightenment.
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