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Apathy, Now There's A Dirty Trait,
By joseexist in Musings On Muses
September 29, 2009

Apathy, now there’s a dirty trait to possess. It’s the bane of intellectuals and the repository for slackers. Its walls hem in many who would otherwise rise above and excel in life. It’s a gateway to ignorance and depression. Allow it to take root in your life and failure becomes one of many bitter fruits its asphyxiating vines will bear. All we need do is to sit back, relax, and let it, “sneak around amuck”.

As parents we are bestowed the honor or raising our young. The breakneck pace of today’s world threatens our sanity in every instant. It becomes, though it never should, easy to slip into an apathetic state of mind. Throw your hands up and admit defeat to no one in particular. Such faltering can curse the futures of our children. As apathy is contagious, they can catch it all too easily. Anyone can catch it from any source imaginable.

The reasons for apathy are as many and varied as there are reasons to hate it. Lack of concern allows problems to fester into larger and larger behemoths. Lethargy buries us away from the world and we feel ourselves fade away. The dishes pile up in the sink, clothes spill from hampers, dust collects everywhere, homework goes unfinished, and we just droop ourselves past each scene of the detritus we have allowed to accumulate.

What about the world outside? You remember that one don’t you? That place where we once met friends, watched sunrises, and full moons in the night. It’s the place where we have to go, reluctantly, to survive somehow. Bills can’t be paid if we don’t make the journey out amongst all the things we could care less about.

If by chance we can pull ourselves out of the fog, the discoveries we will make will surely slam us head first into reality. We will find that our children have turned into teenagers. Their impressionability has outpaced their age and they have contracted a severe case of “apathy”. How do we know? That’s easy, just look into their rooms. How much floor can you see? What sights and smells are assaulting your senses? How can our children compete with the world when they are so afflicted with indifference to their own situation?

We can see the students in other countries outpacing our kids. They go on to higher learning while ours go straight to grindstone jobs that they just barely get with a diploma or GED. Our new generation of backbreaking workers with low pay and few skills become the patients of kids from other countries that went on to be doctors. Our children’s failed marriages are argued in courts by foreign born lawyers who learned in the colleges they should have attended. Call to have your cable serviced and strain to understand the accent on the other end of the line. Why don’t our children have these positions in society? Apathy.

These paragraphs have been written with the most extreme situation in mind. Granted, it may not be this bad yet. Do we know how bad it really is though? The statement, “we should have seen this coming.” is the culmination of ennui. If we allow it to get that far away from us and deep into the fog of life, it may be too late. There are many aspects of our day to day lives we have no control over but, there are still plenty of things we do. Are we so weary of our existence that we languish in a fashion that allows things to simply continue along the same path? It takes two people to make a change, one to instigate or inspire the change, and another to be forced or inspired to change. Without the actions of either, nothing will ever change.

I was lucky to have many great teachers over the years and from each of them I learned something unique. It wasn’t always the curriculum that was dictated by law to be taught. There were plenty of wisdoms I picked up on. One such fundamental lesson was to keep learning at all cost for as long as you live. You get to go to school for only so long without having to pay tuition. Even though college may be out of reach, learning never is. The breadth and scope of your intelligence will always be something you can add to. Your mind and what you put into it will always be something no one in the world can take away from you. Right and wrong may not always be clear cut in life but, useful knowledge will always be the clearest of bells that tolls loudly and shouts, “Whether class was in session or not, I was learning!”

When I see apathy take root and spread like the vicious little weed that it is, I am infuriated. As a muse though, it stirs my mind into a whirling frenzy of mental retaliatory contemplation. No matter what it inspires I will never give it the credit it is due. Apathy deserves only to be treated the same way it causes us to treat our own lives. It might illicit a song or two from me but I could care less which ones they are. At all cost adults must quash it in both themselves and in their children. Apathy’s loss is always the worlds gain.