At least not all the time.
It’s been dogma among various groups in our current social landscape that not speaking boldly or loudly against an injustice, proven true or otherwise, is almost as reprehensible as committing the act of injustice itself.
This is wrong.
It is often easy to paint a line in the sand and create a dichotomy whenever there is any spark of conflict; where one side is the victim and the other is the assailant, prey and predator, the oppressed and the oppressor. It is an easy picture to paint. It’s a comfortable picture to paint, that’s why this oversimplified deconstruction of dissent is often misleading because there are far more than two sides to any aspect of life.
Far, far more.
It’s lazy thinking to water down any argument or conflict into good and bad, black and white, us and them. Of course, I’m not disregarding issues that have clear right and wrong “sides”, like apartheid, the holocaust, or the 333 years of the blatantly unjust Spanish colonization of the Philippines. But the vast majority of problems land in a spectrum of gray, a spectrum that has been moved, changed, and shifted by the wisdom brought by education and history.
And silence. Silence can mean more than just being complicit or amenable. Silence can mean discerning. It can mean taking your time to take in all the information you need to make a personal decision. Silence can mean patience. It can mean waiting for the right moment to say something or act. Silence can mean anxiety. It can mean being helplessly fearful of what might come after you reveal your beliefs. Silence can mean education and re-education. It can mean re-thinking your childhood values and recalibrating everything you’ve ever known. And that takes not only time, but wisdom, willingness, and above all, humility.
Silence can mean preparing to make the hard decisions in life, to pursue the hard conversations with your closest friends and family members, and to never be perceived the same again. Silence can mean preparation to leave the life you’ve had and have thrived in for something more unstable, more unsafe, and more unclear.
“Silence means siding with the oppressor” is such an ignorant blanket statement that discounts all the other things people can do to battle injustice. We must understand that the lives everyone is living are as different as different can be, and it’s on us to empathize and settle with the fact that this difference can mean the world.
And before you judge others because of their “silence” or “indifference” to issues that are important to you, inspect inwards towards the indifference you have on issues that are important to others too, issues that fly by under your radar unwatched and unnoticed, at least in your own social sphere and friend group.
It’s impossible to care about everything that warrants caring.
No one is a god. No one is an all-knowing being capable of consistently upholding an unyielding moral compass. What we are, however, are people. People who nonetheless strive to uphold our flawed and innately biased moral compasses to become better and to do good.
The bottom line is, most people are just getting by with their lives. Most people don’t care about issues that don’t affect them directly, because most people are just too busy surviving and don’t have the privilege to think of societal issues in broader senses. And "most people" includes you and me and everyone else who has ever struggled in life.
This is why we must have empathy. We can’t expect to win against evil if we spurn all those who seek to help or are on the fence about doing so.
Acceptance is the answer, never hostility, never resentment, and never hypocrisy.
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