Negativity of indeffierence

Indifference is one of the many cruel faces of society; the face of a monster without emotion or empathy for suffering. People around the world must withstand inhumane and unbearable conditions while others silently watch or ignore. These bystanders either have no interests in the anguish of victims or are consumed by a greater emotion. As seen through the numerous genocides that have taken place, indifference leads to something negative if action is not taken against perpetrators or against the situation. Apathy towards the small things also may add up to something bigger in the end, and when people start to ignore the minor details that make up a whole entity, the importance of that entity is degraded. Indifference has an adverse effect on people, society, and the attitude of nations.

In the early 1940’s, Germany was in turmoil. The mass murders of millions of Jewish people by the Nazis set up an atmosphere of fear and these victims were witnesses to the indifference of Germans and foreign nations alike. As Adolf Hitler seized power, he developed a plan for murder, which started with ghettoization; this was the process of restricting the Jews to a congested area of a major city where the conditions were very pitiable (Jones 151). As World War II continued and Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Jews were put into concentration camps, or death camps. Here they died not only through the utilization of gas chambers and killings by the Nazis, but also because of starvation, disease, and work overload (Jones 152). The Allies and the churches in Germany were the main perpetrators of indifference to the Jews. The Allies were still shaken up from World War I and sought appeasement from Hitler instead of hostility. At a meeting in ...

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...nd this could be detrimental to the population. A prime example of this is seen through the 1964 death of Kitty Genovese. As Genovese was walking home, she was being stalked and was eventually murdered by a strange man. While she was being stabbed, her cried for help, and as many of her neighbors watched, she died. Thirty-eight of her neighbors had admitted that they saw her being killed, but did not do anything to stop the murder (Wainright, “The Dying Girl that No One Helped”).

Indifference has slowly pervaded society through mass killings and ignorance to details. To hinder anything massive from happening again, nations need to be aware of what’s going on in the world and take action. People in society need to be mindful and attentive to trivial niceties because if one mistake goes unchanged, who’s to say a bigger inaccuracy won’t lead to something horrendous?