In his book Truth and Indignation, Ronald Niezen provides a more nuanced approach to the term “indignation” which can be boiled down to:
being so pissed off by a crime of injustice that you actually do something about it.
I feel like that’s where so many of us get stuck.
With every passing day comes a new revelation of some form of large-scale corruption, dumbfounding bigotry, and even deeper layers of institutional discrimination — making it is easy to feel hopeless to do anything and so, we don’t. The pessimistic part of me thinks that’s what society intends for us to feel; they want to bury us under these mountains of one-click conveniences, leave us stuck in valleys of disillusioned privacies, and keep us fighting in shallow races to corporate tops, all so that we don’t fight back in the bigger battles, all so that we stay distracted by ultimately meaningless troubles and therefore continue to do nothing.
For many of us, George Floyd’s untimely death was a wake up call from a deep slumber filled with nightmares disguised as dreams.
I found myself in tears discussing George Floyd one day because I just didn’t understand why any of this was happening. It just didn’t feel fair to me…