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Thursday, February 08, 2007

Apathy

ap·a·thy n.
1. Lack of interest or concern, especially regarding matters of general importance or appeal; indifference.
2. Lack of emotion or feeling; impassiveness.

A discussion last night has me thinking and a bit riled up. The gist of the coversation was as follows:

The question I posed to the group was, "If you know someone is being wronged or slighted and do nothing aren't you just as bad as the wrongdoer?". I got some blank looks and the conversation continued in another direction. Mind you this was a meeting at church.

Now I'm not talking about running off to another county or meeting with the president. All I meant was speaking up or lending time, making a small donation if you can or redirecting readers to worthwhile sites if you have a virtual presence. Buying from socially responsible companies is another way to lend support. If you know a particular company treats their employees horribly or uses sweatshop labor, don't give them your money.

There are a lot of people who do conduct themselves in this way....but why do so many of us see something, say its a shame and change the channel or go on without a second thought to the rest of their day?

It takes so little to show support for something you believe in. CARE dammit is what I guess I am saying.

Maybe I am guilty as well because I always feel like I am not doing enough. Tonight I am going to a neighborhood group meeting. Maybe I will pose the question to them as well and see what kind of response I get.

I have been charged with chairing a community outreach group at my church. Do they know what they've done hehe. My next step is to try to find a calendar of monthly awareness. If anyone reading knows a good site please let me know. I'd like to base our activities around such a list.

Oh and a lesson I'd like to pass on from a terrible personal experience. Make sure that when a garage tops off your fluids in your car that they don't cut the windshield fluid with water to save money. I had to pull over on the way to work yesterday because I was suffering from a salty windshield. I discovered that there was a large chunk of ice in my washer tank. Now I don't know about you but that kind of makes my truck undrivable, not being able to see while I'm driving. I take Rte. 130 to work which is a busy road. My dealer wasn't responsible because they said it wasn't a vehicle problem and the place that I last had my oil changed at said they were closing..bring it in tomorrow and we'll see what we can do. I ended up sitting in my Element for about a half hour to see if the heat would help. We finally got it squirting and did so until it ran out, refilling it with 100% de-icing fluid. What a saga from someone trying to save money while servicing my car. It's not something you would normally even be concerned about.

Well me and my squirters are off to another wonderfull day at my dream job!

Peace out! and please give a poop about something today.

p.s. in my blog links you have just got to visit Matt's site and watch the video about the amazing child prodigy. I've already passed it on to scads of people.....thanks Matt!

Comments on "Apathy"

 

Blogger Matthew May said ... (9:08 AM) : 

Andrea! Welcome back to blogsville!

You've been missed. Thanks for the plug for the video on my blog, I think it's an Awesome story. If you want to see more of her, you can also type in her name on YouTube.com I think there is a few more stories about her.

Glad your back! :)

And about your post, it's okay to feel like you need to do more.. but it takes a lot of people doing a little to affect change, we can't take the world on by ourselves... only do our part. :)

 

Blogger andrea said ... (7:54 AM) : 

Matt that is so sweet of you to say. I am so glad to be BACK not just on blogger but as my old self if you know what I mean.

I think my frustration is when I go to a community meeting for the 5th or 6th and instead of the original 25 people only 6 show up. The whole idea of the group I'm in is to gather 1 or 2 people from each church to have a big group of collective effort. It seems really hard to get people excited to act..ya know.

Not giving up though :)

 

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