As I sat down today to eat my large turkey sandwich and fresh fruit that I had purchased from the dining hall about ten short minutes ago with the meal plan my parents pay for, I turned the pages of the conversation between Richard D. Heffner and Elie Wiesel. My fingers were almost heavy with the guilt I was now carrying; the sandwich suddenly did not taste so good.
Elie Wiesel's recorded opinions carried an enormous amount of ethos and pathos, making me feel like a spoiled, gluttonous, ungrateful brat as I chowed down on the lunch so many in the world do not have. I have not experienced this feeling from other authors who have cried for world-wide attention to suffering people, but I did from Elie Wiesel. His credibility as a human-rights activist is beyond convincing. A Holocaust survivor, having experienced human suffering first-hand, Nobel laureate, and powerful author, his voice is certainly heard by his readers. His word choice and tone all the more add to the power of his ethos; his is heard by the audience as a true peace activist.
Additionally, Wiesel utilizes pathos in his speech. He appeals to the reader's compassion, making him or her examine their own conscious and feel for their “brothers.” For example, he uses images, citing the apartheid in South America, murderous whites interrupting black funerals, to kill more. He brings to the attention how indifferent the public is to world suffering, which stirs feelings of supreme guilt in the reader and the desire to act.
The desire to act, to improve, is the effect Elie Wiesel hopes to achieve by his numerous speeches, literary works, and this particular conversation. He wants to create the sense of responsibility in every human being for exhibiting compassion for our fellow man. The feeling of responsibility, he believes, should be inevitable. Technology, despite our recent analysis of its destructive capabilities through past readings, has its uses. Technology allows the spread of information, for example, images and descriptions of the genocide occurring in Darfur. With the hyper -speed of every link, news article, photograph, and YouTube video, the spread of this concrete, observed information is possible to every point of the globe.
However, this does not mean every person on every point of the globe knows this information. This is where the gap between information and knowledge occurs. Although our sensory abilities may take in the information, with our eyes and ears, that does not mean it has been encoded into our minds our hearts. Because of the widespread indifference, which Wiesel says “now is equal to evil” (49), the information is not knowledge. We are not aware of the suffering innocent people of Darfur, because the majority of us have not encoded it to our consciousness. We are not present in the present world. Our presence lies in our individual everyday lives, independent of our “brothers” because of the way our modern world has been made so convenient for ourselves.
For once, the information of the suffering world has been encoded into my consciousness as knowledge, as a resulf of the effectiveness of Elie Wiesel's application of ethos and pathos within this conversation. I am now aware of the horrors that occur to people just like me across the world. They could be sitting in an air-conditioned dorm room eating a full lunch, typing away on the market's modern technology. I could be the one suffering from no shelter, water, or extreme hunger. I am aware that it is my responsibility to act as my brother's keeper. But where will my presence be in an hour or two? On the way to buy some new clothes, or to eat dinner in an air-conditioned cafe. Indifference is in fact a modern evil.
No comments:
Post a Comment