A friend of mine sent me some Marquette tribune articles from the spring of 1968 when a group of students were struggling against the administration for what they called “institutional racism”. The president of the time ignored our message but tried to marginalize some of the leaders of the movement. If this sounds familiar it is, for now often the administration not only ignores our message, but when possible, ignores the messengers.

When the messenger is attacked for the message he or she has a chance to practice nonviolence by absorbing the attack and keeping to the messenger. But when the message and messenger are ignored who do we act nonviolently? I asked that question at a recent conference on Gospel Nonviolence and there seem to be no easy answers. When a messenger is attacked he or she is at least recognized as someone worth attacking. When a messenger is ignored it is as if he or she did not matter.

This reminds me of a quote from the famous Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”

This quote is more remarkable when you realize that Elie Wiesel was a teenager who lived through a horrendous experience, with his father, in Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944–1945 at the height of the Holocaust toward the end of the Second World War.

The ‘crimes against humanity” he experienced and described in his book “Night” came when everything is inverted, every value destroyed. “Here there are no fathers, no brothers, no friends,” a Kapo tells him. “Everyone lives and dies for himself alone.”[1]
So here is a man who described an unspeakable attack on his humanity saying the opposite of love is not hate, its indifference.”

How do we struggle for truth and love when we face indifference and the message and messenger is ignored?

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