DEPRAVED INDIFFERENCE: Disregard — e.g., failure to act — for the life, security and safety of human beings that is so egregious that it must be assessed in the same manner and extent as crimes committed by individuals with deliberately harmful intentions – e.g., Treason.
The death of human empathy is one of the earliest signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism. – Hannah Arendt
Indifference, or silence about atrocities, aid despots’ intention to dissolve the sense of community. Neighbors begin to see each other as enemies when Fascist provocateurs are the enemies of the nation and ordinary citizens.
Indifference is also related to the Bystander Effect and the duty to rescue: If in a Democracy, silence and toleration have led unjustifiable risk to others, the people have a duty to rescue them from the conditions, just as the founders did in 1776.
Webster says: Treason is the highest crime of a civil nature of which a person can be guilty.
The ease and degree by which silence morphs into Depraved Indifference is directly proportional to the degree of threat to the nation’s survival as a Democracy. Our threat is significant.
The critical threshold between mere silence and depraved indifference is at the very beginning of Treasonist behavior by governmental leadership – 2007, the clear rise of Trump and his unimpeded march to dominant control of all governmental operations.
The threat we are experiencing from the behavior of our rulers in DC is greater than anything Americans have experienced, including the Civil War. In the Civil War, the president of the United States was not the Supreme Leader of Domestic Enemies.
Under the onslaught by despots, “ordinary” citizens who are weak and fearful are prone to suffer corrupted spirits and become indifferent, apathetic, insensitive, and heartless about the harm inflicted on other people, thus empowering our enemies – foreign and domestic. People in foreign nations have expressed great delight in Trump’s destruction of American Democracy.
Americans do not decide in a sudden paroxysm to embrace the traitorous philosophy of White Supremacy, for example. Nor are we born with a genetic predisposition to oppose the Democratic Principles that set the founders’ Vision, Values, Mission, and Responsibilities of American citizens.
Development and toleration of a treasonous attitude develops in large measure because of the attitudes of people closest to us, and the courage it takes to oppose such people. Expressing opposition against the prevailing thinking of our family members, our friends, and members of our affinity groups, requires an extraordinary level of moral courage. Few people are willing to risk rejection, exclusion, and abhorrence from people they see every day, rather than to be embraced by them.
In today’s America, Racists, Plutocrats, Misleaders, Misogynists, Narcissists, Egomaniacs, Treasonists, False Prophets, Xenophobes, Misanthropists, and Tyrannists openly spew and demonstrate their hatred with impunity despite the fact that they are hugely outnumbered by Americans who do not fall into those vile categories.
America’s Fascist attacks against voting rights prevent the election of enough politicians who are true Advocates for Democratic Principles; so, policy decisions favor the wealthy and neglect the needs of average Americans.
People dishonor themselves and become their people’s most powerful oppressors when they fail to exercise their responsibility – e.g., with their ballots — to alter or abolish a government that treats even some of its citizens unjustly, even if they are not the direct victims of the injustice.
Two of America’s recent election outcomes were determined in large measure by the people who did not vote. Low turnouts in 2016 and 2024 put Trump in office and emboldened his cultists. As 2020 showed, however, the people will rise up against despots and evict them from power. But it takes enlightened, statesperson leaders, Advocates for Democracy, rather than maniacal political partisans, to keep the focus on the founders’ democratic objectives after the elections.
The 190 million Americans who did not select Trump in 2024 must be effectively targeted and weaponized by political statespersons. They fall within these varied and overlapping categories:
78+ million who voted for Harris and Others
111 million self-disenfranchisers
52 million 18-30 year-old non-voters
12-13 million Black non-voters
Forty-five percent of the population who claim to be Independents, nearly twice as high as those who claim to be Republicans or Democrats. That number is nearly twice the number who claim to members of Republican and Democratic party. (Gallop)
Non-White eligible voters accounted for more than three-quarters of total U.S. electorate growth since 2000 (PEW)
Voting is a supreme patriotic act commensurate with military service. If all American citizens of voting age exercised their patriotic enfranchisement responsibility, autocracy, tyranny, brutal economic disparities, injustice, and unfair laws would be impossible. (PEW RESEARCH CENTER – The Changing Racial And Ethnic Composition Of The .S. Electorate)
