Dec 5, 04:28 AM
Will we just say, “never again” again?
Don’t we regret that our country didn’t do all it could have to stop the Holocaust? Don’t we wish we would have done something to stop the murder of 800,000 Rwandans in 1994, not to mention the millions more killed in the destructive wars and massacres that followed in Zaire/DRC?
Or do we prefer to just wait until it’s safe to once again mumble, “never again?”
As Nicholas Kristof wrote in his column this week, Senator Paul Simon once estimated that if just 100 people from each Congressional district had contacted their representatives about Rwanda, the US would have gotten involved to stop the genocide.
And don’t think we couldn’t have done it. The head UN officer in Rwanda at the time, Romeo Dallaire, determined that a force of only 5,000, which could have been drawn from around the world, would have been needed to end the killing.
Although this genocide is unfolding more slowly than Rwanda, the situation is similar in many respects, including these two most important ones: The American government could do a lot more, and they would do it if the American people demanded it.
What does demanding it take? Five minutes to contact your senators and representative could make a huge difference.
Go to SaveDarfur.org and send an email. They even have sample messages. Don’t think anymore about it just do it.
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your very own blog site
I've visited a number of these.
Most recently a very interesting prof at Calvin College in Grand Rapids who talks about the dangers of fundamentalism. James K A Smith.
I lived through the sad time in our country when a small province in Nigeria, Biafra, was allowed to starve to death. We often do too little too late.
D
— David Wagner Dec 8, 06:53 PM #
This must be the blog you were talking about:
http://www.calvin.edu/~jks4/
— Mark Dec 8, 10:04 PM #