Arthur Gordon quotes “Some people confuse acceptance with apathy, but there’s all the difference in the world. Apathy fails to distinguish between what can and what cannot be helped; acceptance makes that distinction. Apathy paralyzes the will-to-action; acceptance frees it by relieving it of impossible burdens.”
One must wonder what the connection is between apathy and suicide as there has been too many deaths inside our prisons lately that has caused many to wonder what it will take to change the trend of our many young and incarcerated people taking their own lives while in prison. I suspect that there is a direct correlation between apathy and suicide as I can see how the two interact with each other taking away any chances of intervention and hope.
Choosing between hanging free above the ground to be free or bleed to death to be free appears to be such an extreme road to take to resolve their problems. Certainly one must acknowledge that when a person reaches such a point in their lives, they must have felt suffocated with the need to pass on as they chose to regurgitate life as they have lived it and feeling dehydrated with hope to survive their own ordeals without help.
Suspicion in my head believes me to think it takes a high degree of excruciated pain to terminate one’s life as so many have done in the past three years inside our Arizona prisons. These individuals must have felt the need to go alone and flee above the ground and join the angels in heaven as Jesus forgives those who trespass against us but find a way to seek remorse from the living spirit while still alive. Jesus himself a prisoner in his life must have known the emotions felt inside that possesses someone to terminate his or her life releasing them from the trapped emptiness or paranoia that they are experiencing in this darkness without help. It is with this faith that the spirit and the good heart of God and His world makes suicide an understandable [yet preventable] act and washes away any sins related to this act.
Most certainly sure they did not want to die this way, they must have thought deeply and carefully about this amputation of life that would set them free and fulfill their desired emptiness that isolation and deprivation brings into the minds of those entrapped inside a prison. Our prisons, paralyzed by these pestilent suicides must awaken and open their eyes as those who choose to hand freely or bleed unconsciously until they are free to no longer breathe the air of their imprisoned world and close their eyes forever. An exception to this logic or rationale would be the minds of those who are disabled and are already experiencing a mental disorder that prevents them to think logically or rationally under such stress or circumstances. For all those who die, this could have been preventable under the right conditions and helpful treatment sought by many but ignored by those who do not seem to care anymore.
Certainly we do not accept death by suicide as a normal way to die but yet it happens too often and nobody is doing anything about it. Today, the apathy of our leaders and citizens becomes more and more evident as instances of the high number of suicides occur within our prisons without end as families mourn their losses and friends come together to deal with these tragedies.
An obvious choice in life is to either participate or get involved or stand idle and become bystanders. “The apathy of bystanders often prevails when instances of [deaths] bullying, hidden crime and extortion occur in communities such as schools, business work areas, underclass ghettos, prisons and the military. The present study models apathetic behavior as a non-cooperative game and attempts to verify this theory through experiments. Furthermore, our research suggests that the apathy of bystanders generally decrease as the number of citizens in a community decrease. In our experimental cases, if the number of members in a group decreases from 40 members to 20 members, the concerned and helpful behavior of bystanders increases by 21%.”
It is suggesting that as our prisons become more overcrowded there will be more apathy towards their problems. In this same study, it suggests that apathy if the number of people in a group decreases, the concerned people will provide helpful behaviors as the actions of the bystanders’ increases changing attitudes and behaviors to help others and prevent tragedies from occurring as they are today.
Source:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053535707000066
