chasing the sun

so I did the thing I wasn't sure I wanted to do at all today and i went to see "Hotel Rwanda." My excitement about the movie had waned with my mood and bitterness toward the Chicago cold, but my roommate and I braved the harsh winter weather and went. I don't cry at movies, hardly ever actually. I did put on my bravest face and cough down a few sobs that sort of sneaked past my throat. I was stunned and frankly, enraged by the time the movie was over.

Will there ever be a cure for ignorance?

I knew the story, but I had somehow missed out on the knowledge that it was the Belgians who first began distinguishing between Rwandan Africans, setting one group apart from the other as those who hold one race above another are often liked to do. Rwandans actually had to look at someone's papers to even tell whether he or she was Hutu or Tutsi.

I remember hearing the recount of a man who went in after the genocide had stopped and the stories people told him, the atrocities he saw committed against the Tutsis...in one instance thousands of them were herded into a stadium and then slaughtered to death with machetes for a period of about two days, the soldiers killed as many as they could the first day, then took a break and started again at sunrise. Some victims survived by lying underneath dead bodies for days until the Hutu militia left.

Yet the most difficult part of the movie for me was when the bus load of white folks, European and American, loaded up and left the hotel, left over a thousand African people behind to be slaughtered. I wonder if I would have been brave enough to stay behind, to show solidarity with the Rwandan people. I'd like to think I would stand up for justice...that I would yell loud enough until someone heard me. Hell, I'm from Texas, maybe I could get George W. on the phone.

What do I do with that? The guilt of doing nothing seems like it would almost be worse than having literal blood on my hands. But I can't save the world from its ignorance.

Don't tell me anymore that people are inherently good, that they will do the right thing because they don't do the right thing. They don't make good choices...they make ignorant choices...they make choices to remain ignorant because they like it.

We all need to feel empowered, we need to feel that we are strong and capable and worthy - and people who have never known true empowerment will mame, slaughter and destroy to get some well-conceived imitation of it. And I'm not just talking about the Hutu...before them it was the Belgians who took what they wanted by force and military might because they could...and before them it was someone else who taught them how to oppress and so the oppressed become the oppressors and it starts all over again.

It sickens me and yet I can't deny who I am and where I come from. I can't feign some moral superiority and say that I, unlike all these other heathens, have always made the right choices and stood up for the oppressed.

Don't you see the future we condemn ourselves to when we follow the wisdom of "might makes right" and "get the hell out of our way because we're the superior super power and we get to make all the rules for everyone"!!

I don't know what I can do, but I've got to do something. I can't just sit here in my comfy apartment watching terror and poverty and injustice on the evening news like its no big deal and well, thank God it isn't me...because it is me, its you, its all of us. When one of us suffers, the rest of us ought to do something and not just let tiny children starve to death. When is it time to stop praying for a solution and start being the solution!