The suffering of silence.

Sufferers of silence

“There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.”—MT

In a post from another blog I spoke about putting legs under our words and titled the post, Talk without action is cheap (and worthless). Our satirist MT apparently agreed, given his quote above. The essence of his words, and mine, concerns accomplishments, or worse; apathy and complacency—the death knells of accomplishment.

Far too often our tendency is based on the flawed notion of, “It an’t my problem,” with the corresponding notion of making nice and not rocking the boat. We maintain a conspiracy of silence, motivated by an unspoken consensus to not mention or discuss given subjects in order to maintain group solidarity, or fear of political repercussion and social ostracism. “Nice people” avoid controversy and ignore the plights of those, seemingly not like us. In so doing we exhibit the mantra of the assumed elite: A “CEO of Self.”

When you cut through the pomposity, a conspiracy of silence is cowardly dishonest and delusional to the point of refusing to acknowledge our connectivity with the interrelated fabric of life. The complexity of living in today’s world is straining this practice to the breaking point. When does ebola become our problem? When does injustice become our problem? When does poverty, or the growing economic polarization become our problem? Bigotry? Racism? Hatred? An environmental catastrophe?

In 1925, following World War I (the War to end all wars) T. S. Eliot wrote a poem called The Hollow Men. The poem of 98 lines ends with “probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English.” Eliot captured the spirit of apathy brilliantly and concluded that the silent conspirators rule the world, not by force, but rather by inaction. He said, 

“We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.”

“Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is…
Life is…
For Thine is the…

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Haunting words to contemplate.