photo: apathy by DiscoWeasel
APATHY
NOUN: 1. Lack of interest or concern, especially regarding matters of general importance or appeal; indifference.
– American Heritage Dictionary
In the past two days, the number of visitors to this ridiculous little blog has been impressive. “Nooses in the White Tree,” received 103 recorded hits as of this morning. This number is a bit elusive as it does not count additional feed stats or hits that aren’t “post specific.” The much increased traffic brought the rank of Brain Drain to 81 on yesterday’s Blog of the Day. In a sea of 1,184,970 WordPress blogs, that means something… Or so I thought.
For a brief moment, I thought I was raising awareness. I thought people might be incensed at the in-your-face racial discrimination against the young black boys known as The Jena Six. I thought more people would find black boys accused of conspiracy to commit murder for allegedly participating in an unarmed school fight to be ridiculous. I thought people would be outraged that the school fight stemmed from three white students hanging nooses in a shade tree reserved for themselves. I thought people would object to those whites wielding a beer bottle and sawed off shot gun to beat and threaten them. I thought people would be inspired to ask the Department of Justice to investigate the vindictive DA who published a threat to the boys prior to trial, the defense lawyer who called no witnesses and cross examined no witness for the state, the white judge and all-white jury made up of the DA’s friends. I thought the link I provided made it easy enough. I thought one click wasn’t too much to ask. I thought sending the post to family and friends would result in comments of dismay and?horror. I thought I could join forces with those who responded, that we could, at the very least, organize a letter writing campaign in support of justice for those boys and their families. In my wildest imagination, I hoped somebody would care enough to act. Boy, was I an ass.
According to the stats on internal blog activity, stats which tend to be a bit more accurate than external hits, one person clicked the transcript?I added on Democracy Now! and one clicked the collection of articles on AfroSpear. Several looked at some pictures. That was it. Not one single comment was left. My email produced zero personal replies. What is most disappointing is that the link to the DOJ petition was never clicked.
Maybe I should have been more passionate than factual. Maybe I didn’t pick the most compelling quotes to transcribe from Democracy Now! — even before their official transcript was posted. Maybe my writing sucks when blinded by emotion. If any one of those reasons is the sole cause of getting nearly zero response, so be it. Unfortunately, I think the real problem is that the majority of people just don’t care.
People who care DO something.
Some people may have already read about it or signed the petition so they didn’t have to click the links 🙂
Hi bronzetrinity,
You are absolutely right. People may have seen it elsewhere. Still, my numbers only jumped the day I mass emailed everyone I knew with the link. I’m not getting much random traffic here and I’m quite sure the majority of those I wrote had heard nothing about this. That said, not one out of more than 106 visitors visited the petition? This apathy seems indicative as to why the networks care so little about the story. It just doesn’t sell. I suppose that’s what upsets me most.
an Open Letter The Jena Six
By Joseph Young
Washington Informer
Dear Mychal,
I keep thinking about you. I also think about the other young men who have fallen prey to racial hatred. Its existence, more than a century after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, makes me fearful for your life, your safety. The freedom that it promised was tenuous.
It was not entirely without strength. In the proclamation, issued three years into the Civil War, Lincoln declared, at the urging of Frederick Douglass, that the former slaves would be accepted into the Union Army and navy, making the liberated the liberator. By the war’s end, almost 200,000 black servicemen had fought for freedom and saved the Union.
Your generation, like mine, is being denied this freedom our ancestors risked life and limb, so that we may live as free men and women. You can call them heroes, but they were not thinking of themselves when they displayed courage and self-sacrifice on the battlefields of America.
Today, then, to guard against the impending doom of American civilization, is not only opposition to racism, but also the determination to secure the civil rights for which many Americans have paid a heavy toll. Of all the civil rights, the right to learn is the surest prevention from ignorance. If at any time, children are instructed with anti-black bias; and they are made to learn what is not true and what the dominate forces in their lives want them to think is true; there’re guilty of impeding the march toward American civilization.
Astonishing as it is that those students would hang three nooses from the tree at Jena High School as a racial taunt, including calling the black students “niggers”; you would think that America would never again want to see a black person hang from a tree, or behind bars. The nooses show that we, Americans, have not come that far from the cruelties and barbarity of slavery as we think. (Between 1882 and 1968, an estimated 5,000 people, mostly blacks, met their deaths at the hands of lynch mobs.) And this also is an unfortunate comment upon the belief that our schools are the great path to progress, the great equalizer. If our schools are the great path to progress, they must be the freest of our institutions, opposed bitterly to the attempt to indoctrinate our children with racial hatred.
Well, Mychal, as you and the others wait behind bars because of a racially biased and an over zealous prosecutor, it is for us on the outside to continue the unfinished work of our fathers, to set you free. All of you were willing to fight racial hatred, and you know people of goodwill are beside you. If the Confederacy couldn’t stop us, the opposition we now face will fail. When history is written your detractors will get little note, but you will be remembered for standing up for what’s best of the American creed. You are part of a legacy in which our slave forebears fought to birth a new nation. You, Mychal, are a child of America’s destiny.
It was Martin Luther King who said if a man doesn’t have something worth dying for he is not fit to live. Freedom is worth dying for. Justice is worth dying for. Equality is worth dying for. A child is worth dying for, because our job as parents is to protect children.
Mychal, when you feel complete frustration and your narrow jail cell is closing in on your spirit and mind; remember the message of the old slave preacher to his flock whose resistance to oppression might have been completely in vain:
“You are created in God’s image. You are not slaves, you are not “niggers”; you are God’s children.”
Godspeed Mychal,
Your brother in the struggle, Joseph