Sometimes a person reads the news, opens a website just to see what’s going on, and after a few minutes is left with a feeling that’s hard to describe precisely. It’s not about a single news story, a single event, or a single person. Rather, it’s an impression that slowly takes shape from everything we see and hear every day.
Violence, fraud, corruption, arrogance, other people’s tragedies turned into content, private lives exposed to a public that will be looking for something new as early as tomorrow. People do, without much qualm, the very things they condemned just yesterday. Words change their meaning depending on one’s interests, position, and the side one is on at that moment.
After all this, it’s hard not to ask ourselves what kind of world we’re living in—especially here, in our own community.
Perhaps our biggest problem is no longer what is happening, but that we have stopped reacting to so much of it. For years we’ve seen the same patterns, the same injustices, the same excuses, and the same justifications, so what would once have seriously disturbed us often passes today as just another news item among dozens of others.
It seems a person can get used to almost anything—even things they should never get used to.
We get used to the fact that someone isn’t held accountable for what they’ve done, even though everyone knows what happened. That connections open doors that knowledge and hard work cannot. That an honest person has to explain themselves more than the one who caused the problem. Arrogance is seen as strength, loudness as authority, and politeness as a sign of weakness.
None of this becomes normal all at once. That is precisely the problem. Boundaries shift gradually.
First we condemn it. Then we see it a few times. After that, we discuss it briefly. Then we start saying that it’s like that everywhere, that nothing can be changed, and that there’s no point in getting worked up. In the end, we just gloss over the headline and move on.
Perhaps an individual really can’t change the world. Perhaps they can’t even change their own society as much as they’d like to. But they can refuse to accept within themselves what they know is wrong. They can maintain a boundary between what they understand and what they condone, between what they have no influence over and what they still refuse to accept.
Society’s greatest defeat is not that bad things happen. They always will. A far greater defeat comes when we live with them long enough that they no longer bother us. Then the problem is no longer just in the world we see.
We, too, have become part of the problem.
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