"The Perils of Indifference," Vocabulary from the speech

Gratitude is a word that I cherish. Gratitude is what defines the humanity of the human being.

What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means "no difference."

A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.

Can one possibly view indifference as a virtue?

Is it necessary at times to practice it simply to keep one's sanity, live normally, enjoy a fine meal and a glass of wine, as the world around us experiences harrowing upheavals?

Of course, indifference can be tempting -- more than that, seductive.

It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's pain and despair.

Yet, for the person who is indifferent, his or her neighbor are of no consequence.

Their hidden or even visible anguish is of no interest.

Indifference reduces the other to an abstraction.

We felt that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one.

Even hatred at times may elicit a response. You fight it. You denounce it. You disarm it. Indifference elicits no response.

And, therefore, indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor -- never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten.

The political prisoner in his cell, the hungry children, the homeless refugees -- not to respond to their plight, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory.

And in denying their humanity we betray our own.

And our only miserable consolation was that we believed that Auschwitz and Treblinka were closely guarded secrets; that the leaders of the free world did not know what was going on behind those black gates and barbed wire; that they had no knowledge of the war against the Jews that Hitler's armies and their accomplices waged as part of the war against the Allies.

Are we less insensitive to the plight of victims of ethnic cleansing and other forms of injustices in places near and far?

Is today's justified intervention in Kosovo, led by you, Mr. President, a lasting warning that never again will the deportation, the terrorization of children and their parents be allowed anywhere in the world?

Every minute one of them dies of disease, violence, famine.

And together we walk towards the new millennium, carried by profound fear and extraordinary hope.