PrintFebruary 24, 2011
Outrage Fatigue
Recent news has included the report that four Americans, on a round-the-world mission to distribute bibles, were murdered by Somali pirates who had seized the Americans' yacht. A U.S. Navy vessel which had been trailing the yacht heard gunfire, and sailors boarded the yacht and found the Americans' bodies. The sailors killed several of the pirates and took the rest into custody.
Did you experience any outrage over this event? How long did that outrage last? The story broke just a couple of days ago; is anyone still talking about it?
Last week we learned that an American reporter, Lara Logan, had been savagely raped by an Egyptian mob, in an attack that went on for more than twenty minutes before a contingent of soldiers was able to put a stop to the attack. How long did our outrage over that barbarous act last? Slightly longer than the attack itself?
Does anyone speak anymore about the beheadings of Daniel Pearl or Nick Berg? The "news cycle" moved on, and somehow the memory of those abominable killings, and whatever outrage they engendered, slipped from our collective consciousness. Even if we somehow put those atrocities out of our minds, the news that videos of the beheadings were selling briskly in the Islamic world should have kept our outrage at least simmering.
It's becoming clear to me that we're in a state of "outrage fatigue". That's my term for the malaise of passivity that has settled over us. Ten years after 9/11, and people act as if it never happened. Meanwhile, the same people who danced in the street and passed out candy to celebrate the wholesale annihilation of innocents propose to build a monument to themselves on the site, and our outrage seems to fade in a year or so.
Worse, the canard that Islam is "the religion of peace", whenever it is uttered, whether by followers of Islam or by their apologist lackeys in media and government, goes unchallenged by people who have seen with their own eyes, time and again, the atrocious evidence of how blatantly fraudulent a claim it is.
Those same lackeys never hesitate to condemn the "anger" they claim to see at Tea Party rallies, or the "angry rhetoric" they claim to hear on talk radio.
They see anger where there is none, and condemn it as if there's nothing to be angry about.
We should still be livid over the Mumbai massacres, or the betrayal and slaughter at Ft. Hood, or every other cowardly and ungodly act committed around the world in the name of a "peaceful" religion.
And we should be livid at the ever more brazen agenda to weaken and destroy us from within. But there's more hue and cry raised over a bad call at a football game!
What will be the next ghastly headline? How long will our outrage last? All the way through to the next news cycle, or maybe just long enough to poach an egg? I think if we fail to get our blood boiling, our goose is cooked!
