Inaction as Action

I want to touch briefly on Arjuna and the Bhisma Parva, and the policy of inaction presented in the reading.

These ancient concepts that we find in archaic texts can sometimes slip into the depths of inaccessibility. I’d like to try to move us out of the broad, abstract, and merely theoretical, and into the realm of pragmatism and practicality. What does it mean for inaction to be a mechanism of real, substantive action?

Having grown up in a community and a family steeped in Jewish tradition, if my thoughts didn’t flash to the horrors of World War II. After the war, during the Nuremberg Trials and other judicial proceedings, European citizens who had been bystanders to the murders of Jews by the Nazi regime were prosecuted as war criminals.

Or take a more recent, far less extreme iteration of this idea: the Trayvon Martin case of earlier this year, that placed in the spotlight Florida’s “stand your ground law,” a rule that actually dictates that citizens must engage in inaction, a potent and effective form of action in cases of potential gun violence.

If I opt not to turn a paper in on time, I’m engaging in inaction, and accordingly engaging in an action whose consequences I will reap. Mahatma Gandhi utilized inaction as a powerful means of action in his many hunger strikes.

Just some thoughts.