Can a person’s apathy “grow” the more it is in use? Is it like a muscle that, over time, becomes stronger and larger? Or rather, as a culture, is our apathy a form of selective blindness? We are completely willing to share wise quotes by an Indian politician, or the latest in Naila Nayem’s crazy antics. We express outrage over the murder of a lion, and yet, nary a whisper can be heard from across a million Facebook time-lines over what happened on Monday night.
But then again, why should it? Almost every month, something brutal and horrid shows up on our computer or television screens, and shakes us off of our seats. The anatomy of each reaction is the same, however, save a few minor differences. The news reaches us -- we decry to all who would listen to us about the sorry state of our country, about how things are going downhill, and how people are stepping into barbarity and savagery, as though the past was a rosy-hued wonderland.
Inevitably, someone finds a way of blaming the government and then the issue is dissected by a triumvirate of talking heads on your favourite news channel around 10pm, and then, slowly, everything is forgotten.
Sometimes, if we care just a little bit more, we join a procession or a protest somewhere -- more often than not, in Shahbagh. Newspaper staff come out to these events, pictures are taken, we wave our social media activist flag, tweeting pictures and our rage in 140 characters, and then we all leave for home, our broken hearts mended and our dissonant conscience assuaged.
Until something else happens, that is.
Think back over the year of bloodshed that we have seen -- the murder of the child in Uttara last November (Zubair), the boy who fell down the open shaft in December (Jihad), the innumerable people who died in the political violence at the start of the year, and so on. I can give even more examples, but the point is this: How many of their names do we even remember?
It is truly disheartening to realise that we live in a country where people are more vocal about whether gay people can legally marry in a country 8,000 miles away -- or about the murder of a lion -- than the sadistic torture and subsequent death of a child.
Or perhaps there is a flavour of the month aspect in our collective outrage -- a selective attention to the kind of things we pretend to be shocked and appalled by on Facebook. Is that why the outrage over Rakib’s death is the tiniest fraction of what it is when Bangladesh plays a cricket match? We’ve already expressed how shocked we are over Rajon -- is our collective unconscious so numb that it is thinking to itself: “I’ve already showed my outrage over the murder of a child this week, time for something else …”?
It could even be the nature of the media itself -- a by-product of our lowered attention spans and our avoidance of great walls of text. Perhaps the only reason the murder of Rajon garnered so much coverage was because of how egregious it was, and more importantly, because there was ample photographic evidence of it.
Does Rakib’s death not merit even a whisper because there were no graphic photos showing his distended stomach as air was pumped into his body till he died? Perhaps we should retire our saying of “machhe bhaate Bangali” and adopt something more along the lines of “out of sight, out of mind”?
Our country has made great strides in recent years -- our status as a middle income country, and the recent settlement of the land issues which have caused untold suffering for thousands of people for the past 60 years.
They should be lauded. But it seems, somewhere in that inexorable march to progress, we have lost our souls. We are evolving into a nation of apathy, greed, and intolerance, where not a tear is shed when a child is brutally murdered.