Untitled - July Column

Untitled

The way I see things, there is a connection between social apathy - particularly student apathy - and spiritual apathy. I say it now, and my explanations and sidetracks follow: There is apathy because there is lack of a clear threat jeopardizing your current lifestyle or beliefs.

Way back several centuries, when Christianity was at its infancy, the Christians' very lives were at stake. The mere act of calling on the name of the Lord had gotten many people killed. But then for the early Christians, there was a clear distinction between what was spiritually right and wrong. Either you stand up for your beliefs and die or you live, but forfeit your faith.

One group called the Anabaptists had preached the Gospel in Europe. In exchange, their members got decapitated and had their heads displayed on street posts. Some believers who died due to torture suffered extreme pain for their faith. Imagine a human being crushed at every joint by a mallet, and having his now flimsy and blood-dripping body threaded through the spokes of a wheel like an octopus and hung to die. Imagine a person hung upside down for hours (so blood rushes to the upper body) and having his groin displaced towards his torso by a wood saw (since blood is accumulated in the upper body, lesser blood is lost as the saw cuts, and the longer one suffers).

Given the situation, no Christian could profess and be apathetic. He was deeply involved in what was happening around him, because there is a threat that keeps him on his feet, completely alert and watchful.

By the way, as for the Anabaptists, their children continued to preach the Gospel. Many people were awed by this exceptional courage and converted to Christianity.

Fast forward. As the years passed by, the threat level gradually subsided from life threatening to "trivial" problems of interpretation. Now, Satan attacks Christians with the weapon called subtlety. Sins are sugarcoated to look innocent, but inside are rotten as ever. This happens because the evil image has been whittled down to look docile and harmless. Sometimes, blatantly bad things are made to look as not that bad. Not going to Church is excusable because you are busy. Anyway, you can make up by cutting down on your sins the next week. Viewing pornography is alright because it's a sign of manhood. Besides, it may help you in your future relationship.

Although Satan is busy chopping you down, it's hard to see because the immediate threats are not there, only the long term ones. Most often, people only realize when they have sunk deep into the quicksand, but from there, it’s hard to recover.

In the same way, I think that issues in the University have always been whittled down to look harmless to the student body. The fact that an ordinary student could not identify any campus issue that can significantly affect his life as a Lasallian is proof. Although the issues are there, they have not been presented to him as something he SHOULD know about.

Swing over to the national picture. Any public official who has said sorry (it’s safe to assume that you say sorry after doing something bad), and yet acts as if that “bad” thing is not that “bad” to merit a punishment (resignation should only be the beginning) should be immediately questionable.

In GMA’s case, her promise to atone for her “lapse in judgment” by working doubly hard is a rip-off of a child’s excuse of studying harder after she failed in a test to avert being spanked by her parents. If I was the parent, I would not buy this excuse – my child should be punished – because this is how love works.

Some students do not care about the issue because of the fact that it seems there is nothing he can do. The issue is distanced from the students: students don’t think their lives could be directly affected. In effect, students are tolerating GMA’s lapses in judgment.

Using the religious argument, this is exactly what Satan wants: tolerance of sins for more sins to pile upon. In fact, why corruption crept up to the top ranks of government is because seemingly nonessential faults in the grassroots level of government were tolerated. Mere “cutting of corners” as Br. Armin said, like our sometimes not following traffic regulations.

Lastly, the thought that there is nothing one can do to influence change degrades the humanity of a person. Are Lasallian students, professors and administrators fully human?

* * *

I wonder why professors whose forte is supposed to be improving efficiency could not handle a quiz efficiently. X comes to the test site 15 minutes late, and suffers from the seeming misfortune of having insufficient test papers to distribute to students. Another 15 minutes is shaved off the 90 minute exam. Was the test extended? No. What’s intriguing was X’s final comment made during the last minutes of the essentially 60 minute exam, and it went something like this: you can always guess the answer. Speaks a lot about how some professors see students.