Waking up to the screams of Darfur

February 16th, 2008

Fulton has been wonderful. I am in my bliss right now, though also more than slightly disturbed. Today I bought a book about ending the genocide in Darfur at a non-profit hippie store because I fell in love with the cover. So far I have read a mere 19 pages and already i have a different perspective on life than even earlier today. It is extraordinary how ignorant and bubbled up Americans really are. I am astonished by how little we as a society care about the mass murder and slaughter of innocent human beings. It is called a genocide because entire villages are targeted for extinction and wiped off the face of the Earth every single fucking day because of their ethnicity and religion. I can feel Bob Dylan’s words rising in my chest: “How many times can a man turn his head, pretending he just doesn’t see.” I am sickened by our uselessness and blindness. We are really and truly blind. Of the plathura of things Brandon said to me of his discoveries, one means everything to me: “Something Australia made me realize was the extent of America’s waste. All the waste!” Beyond his meaning of physical things such as water and plastic and natural resources, I see now our waste of power. We are the superpower, even if we are to fall, and we do nothing worth-while with that. What are we focusing our efforts on right now? A pointless, expensive, religiously-based war where we meddle with Iraq’s politics. That’s all we seem to give a damn about- politics. Not lives or the crimes against humanity smothering Africa. Well wrap your narrow fucking mind around this, America: 4000 fewer people exist because of their religion in just a part of Sudan. Millions of people have been displaced, millions of women have been raped. The government uses starving as a method of murder, poisoning the wastelands meager water supplies by dumping corpses into them. In is beyond inhuman. In Africa today, human beings are slaughtering other human beings by the thousands.
When will America start seeing? When ill we begin to notice what other people are suffering? The answer is blowing in the wind.

Elise