Is There Anger Over Cruelty?

When I was growing up we spent Sunday mornings in church, and the ride home listening to Garrison Keillor on Prairie Home Companion. Sitting through one sermon was enough, and I loathed the wet voice and studio audience that came with tuning in to another. My parents loved his down home anecdotes and witty soliloquies, but for the 10 minutes it took to drive from the parking lot to our house, I’d desperately try to ignore the frequency.

However I enjoy Keillor’s writing more than his voice, and found a point worth reiterating in his most recent column: Where's the Anger Over Cruelty?.

Keillor laments the fact that today, we readily fume over store fronts that close too early and packages that arrive too late. We scream at drivers who cut us off and belittle baristas who accidentally use whole milk instead of skim.

[We] have less interest in war crimes and criminals than, say, in a furtive romance between a president and an intern, or the machinations of Richard Nixon. Those are good stories...whereas the slaughter of 100,000 is a statistic. You wish people got angry about cruelty and not many do.

We get angry, he says, about the wrong things. And because of this, we have nothing left when it comes to getting mad about the right ones.

The lack of affordable and accessible healthcare.
The warped policies of our past president.
The women being murdered in Khartoum for merely choosing to wear pants.

Social injustices, cruelty and indifference surround us every day, yet we elect to raise our voices at our sons and daughters for leaving dirty dishes in the sink. At our friends for arriving ten minutes too late. At the man on the street for driving too slow.

But when the time comes for us to really get angry—to pound our fists and scream out loud—

Only then do we choose to be silent.