What Does it Mean to Refuse Indifference?

The world is breaking my heart.

This morning, I am sitting beside my mother-in-law, watching her sleep and listening to the quiet sounds around us.  I check to make sure she is comfortable, adjust what needs adjusting, and stay close in case she needs me.  There is something about sitting beside another person in this way, with nowhere else I need to be for the moment, that leaves a lot of room for thought.  My mind keeps moving from the woman in front of me to the suffering I see beyond this room, and eventually it lands on a question I first asked as a young girl reading *”The Diary of Anne Frank“: How did people let this happen?

I did not understand the machinery of the Holocaust then.  How can a child understand propaganda, antisemitism, authoritarianism, or how ordinary people could become participants, collaborators, bystanders, or people who simply looked away?  I understood something much simpler.  Anne was a girl.  She was hiding because people wanted to kill her, and I could not understand how the adults around her had allowed the world to become that dangerous.

That question stayed with me because no answer I found could make me comfortable.

The Question I Carried With Me

As I grew older, I began to understand that terrible things rarely happen because everyone involved is simply cruel.  People become afraid.  They follow orders.  People protect themselves.  They trust institutions.  People accept what they are told.  They assume someone else will intervene.  Sometimes suffering becomes so familiar that people stop seeing the individual lives inside it.   None of that makes what happens acceptable.  It does, however, make the question more difficult.

How does a person look at another human being and decide that what happens to them no longer matters?

Over the years, I have asked myself that question many times.  History brings it back to me. So does watching the news.  Institutions raise it when they seem more committed to protecting themselves than the people they were created to serve.  I think about it again when rights I once assumed were secure suddenly seem vulnerable.

Lately, I have been asking it again because of what I see happening between Israelis and Palestinians.

When People Become Categories

I cannot carry Anne Frank’s story with me for decades and then decide that suffering matters less when the people suffering are Palestinian.

That does not mean I equate what is happening in Gaza with the Holocaust.  I do not.  The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and extermination of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.  It has its own history, and that history should never be diminished by careless or false equivalence.

What I carry forward from Anne Frank is not a comparison of histories.  It is a question about what happens when human beings become categories instead of people.

That question matters when I look at Gaza and the West Bank.  United Nations reporting in September 2026 continues to document civilian casualties, displacement, destruction, severe access restrictions, and continuing violence in Gaza.  The ceasefire that began in October 2025 ended large-scale hostilities, but the UN reports that violence and its humanitarian consequences have continued.

In the West Bank, the UN reports continuing displacement, movement restrictions, settlement expansion, demolitions, and more than 1,430 incidents involving Israeli settlers that resulted in casualties, property damage, or both through August 10, 2026.

Israeli suffering belongs in this account too.  Hamas killed Israeli civilians and took hostages.  Israelis have legitimate reasons to fear attacks, and Jewish people carry a history of persecution that should never be dismissed or forgotten.  Acknowledging Palestinian suffering does not require denying any of that.

At the same time, none of those truths requires me to stop seeing Palestinian civilians as human beings.  Both things can be true.  Recognizing one people’s suffering does not require us to deny another’s.

Human rights cannot depend on which side of a border a person was born on.  Human dignity cannot depend on whether someone belongs to the group whose suffering we understand better.  Once we start deciding whose pain deserves our attention, we have already begun turning people into categories.

The Question Keeps Returning

The question does not stop with Israel and Palestine.  Ukraine brings it back as the war continues to devastate civilians.  I encounter it again when I read about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where generations of people have endured violence, displacement, hunger, and conflict over land and resources.  Here in my own country, I hear the same question when women find themselves fighting for rights I once assumed we would never have to defend again.  Corruption raises it in another way, particularly when political power appears more concerned with protecting institutions than the people those institutions were created to serve.

These are not the same stories.  Their histories, causes, and circumstances are different, and I do not want to flatten them into one narrative simply because they all break my heart.  What connects them for me is the recurring possibility that human beings become secondary to power, ideology, territory, money, political identity, or the machinery of an institution.

The scale of it all leaves me feeling powerless. A war does not stop simply because I care about the people caught inside it. No one person can repair every corrupt institution or protect every woman whose rights are threatened. I cannot feed every hungry child, bring every displaced family home, or make every government choose human life over power. Sometimes the sheer scale of suffering becomes so overwhelming that even paying attention begins to feel like another burden I cannot carry.

Perhaps I have been asking the wrong question.  I cannot do everything.  But that does not mean there is nothing for me to do.

The Person in Front of Me

Sitting beside Mary reminds me that the more immediate question is what I do about the person in front of me.

Mary could easily become a collection of categories.  My mother-in-law has dementia.  She needs help walking, bathing, dressing, eating, using the bathroom, and managing many of the ordinary tasks most of us perform without thinking.  In a hospital, she can become a diagnosis, a patient, a fall risk, a room number, or another name on a list of people waiting for care.  None of those descriptions is wrong, but none of them tells me who she is.

I know who Mary is.  She has a history, a personality, preferences, fears, humor, memories, frustrations, and ways of communicating that I have learned over time.  She is still the woman who lived a whole life before dementia changed what she could do and say.  Her limitations do not erase the person she is.

That matters to me far beyond caregiving.  It is easy to care about humanity in the abstract.  It is harder to remain attentive to an actual human being when that person is inconvenient, frightening, foreign, politically different, dependent, angry, sick, poor, displaced, or simply outside the group we instinctively identify with.  Abstraction gives us distance.  Categories make complicated people easier to dismiss.

That is what has always haunted me about Anne Frank’s story.  I was horrified not only by the people who wanted her dead, but by the system that reduced human beings to a category and then used that category to justify what was done to them.  Anne was not an abstraction.  She was a girl with a family, a personality, dreams, fears, frustrations, humor, and a life that mattered.

Mary is not an abstraction either.  Neither is the Palestinian child I read about in the news, the Israeli family living with the fear of another attack, the Ukrainian civilian whose home has been destroyed, the person in the Democratic Republic of the Congo whose life has been shaped by violence and displacement, or the woman fighting to retain a right she once believed was secure.

Seeing Is Not Passive

I cannot personally change all of their circumstances, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.  But I do not want to use my lack of power as an excuse for having no responsibility at all.

Caring for Mary has taught me that seeing a person is not passive.  If I notice that she is uncomfortable, I respond.  I take the time to understand when she cannot make herself understood.  If her dignity is being overlooked, I speak up.  If there is something I can do to make her day safer, gentler, or less lonely, then I do it.

I cannot care for every person whose suffering breaks my heart in that same direct way.  I cannot stop every war, repair every broken institution, or protect every person whose rights are threatened.  But I can let what I see shape what I do. Before I speak, I can learn. I can tell the truth as clearly as I know how. Supporting people who are doing necessary work is another way I can contribute when I cannot do that work myself. Paying attention to the leaders, policies, institutions, and causes I support is part of that responsibility. Most importantly, I can let another person’s humanity inconvenience me, challenge me, and change something about the way I live.

Refusing to Look Away

Maybe that is the part of Anne Frank’s story I understand differently now.

When I was young, I wondered how people could let something so terrible happen.  Now I understand that terrible things rarely depend on one person making one terrible decision.  They grow through thousands of smaller decisions: to stay silent, to look away, to believe the category, or to accept the explanation that makes someone else’s suffering easier to live with.

People become exhausted.  They become afraid.  They convince themselves that nothing they do will matter.  Sometimes they simply stop listening.  I understand that temptation more than I want to.

But I do not want helplessness to become another reason to do nothing.

That may still sound small when the suffering is this enormous.  Some days, it feels painfully small to me.  But perhaps the world does not only change because someone has enough power to solve everything.  Perhaps it also changes when enough people refuse to become comfortable with another person’s suffering, when they refuse to let a category replace a face, and when they allow what they see to ask something of them.

I do not know how to fix the world.  I cannot stop every war or repair every institution that fails the people it was created to serve.  What I can do is refuse to make my lack of total power an excuse for having no responsibility.

The world is breaking my heart.  I do not know how to fix it.  But I do not want to look away, and I do not want to remain unchanged by what I see.