Indifference Squared

I've noticed that people in Puerto Rico are often indifferent to their community's problems. By extension, they are largely indifferent to national problems. For a time, I was critical of this stance. Now I defend it--partially.

Like any organism in an over-stimulating environment, We either select the stimuli We are willing to respond to or We let Ourselves end up catatonic. If one simply lives their daily routine with the attention level of pond scum, one can manage quite well. But as one's attention and perception levels increase, the tendency to become overwhelmed increases, ending either in disgust and rejection (back to pond scum level, albeit by conscious choice), catatonia or righteous-but-flaccid indignation.

And the reason one's indignation is flaccid is that the opportunity to make one's anger heard, or to put one's desired solution into effect, has been either blocked (to serve the convenience of those who benefit from keeping the crappiness flowing), subverted (ditto) or tossed under the extended mantle of indifference.

So being indifferent is an adaptation to...indifference. How quaint.

But an adaptation, by any organism, that limits said organism's chances for progress and even survival is not an adaptation--it is a dead end. What it allows is for a maladaptive evolution in which a majority heads straight into extinction, leaving a minority as survivors.

In Nature, them's the breaks. In Puerto Rico, it's an avoidable shame.


The Jenius Has Spoken.