A small town newspaper reporter once said: “All the people I’ve interviewed can be divided into three categories: good, bad, and indifferent, but I’ve not written about many of the indifferent. The indifferent don’t make good stories.”
Indifference doesn’t make for good stories because it doesn’t make for a good life. We can’t live meaningfully if our response to the challenges we face is simply to shrug our shoulders and walk away. Life gets interesting when we are committed to things that matter, things like truth and goodness, like love and peace.
In a television special several years ago, Bill Moyers told the story of a man in New York City who decided he would try to do something to help the hungry. As he went to work each day, he distributed 100 sandwiches to street people. Soon, the homeless lined the sidewalks waiting to be handed a sandwich. Moyers observed: “New York City’s population now runs in excess of 11,000,000 people. A hundred sandwiches will hardly scratch the surface of the need. But while Sam may never move his world very far, at least the direction he is moving is forward.”
That’s the challenge: to shake-off the indifference that settles on our minds and hearts, to do what we can, and to help the world (and ourselves) move forward.
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