I intended to enter it. Unfortunately, I have been unable to get my editorial published in my student newspaper. And my local papers have not yet printed it as a letter to the editor. This invalidates my editorial as a contest entry, although I will still pursue its publication.
But before that day comes, I would like to express what my editorial has to say. So in honor of the contest deadline, I'm posting it here. Enjoy!
This month, my university will be one of many across the country to host rallies to end the genocide currently occurring in Darfur, Sudan—a government-sponsored ethnic cleansing campaign in which over 400,000 people have died and over two million have been displaced.
As a student activist, I helped to organize these events. Yet it has been a struggle, over the past few years, to continue to organize: to pull all-nighters photocopying flyers instead of studying, to talk to people about genocide even when I’m not sure they care, to write petitions when I’d rather be writing on someone’s Facebook wall.
The hard reality of genocide raging on in Darfur makes me feel as though we, as activists, have accomplished nothing tangible, despite the fact that Darfur has gained attention from the media, the public and even the President. Does it matter if my actions help put words in legislators’ speeches, but not food in empty bellies? What good is it to change rhetoric if I cannot change reality?
As those questions remain unanswered, I’ve begun to question more. I’ve begun to examine my own reluctance to take action. I realized that my apathy isn’t just because I’ve lost some hope in activism; it’s also because of something more American, more insidious, something that I have come to think is what’s keeping peace from progressing not just in Darfur, but around the globe: my own emotional isolation.
I think I was raised on escapism. Like many of us, I saw violent movies from a young age, and learned their violence was only “for pretend”. When I was a little older, I saw violence on the news; but perhaps because of my early association between television violence and fiction, the kind of large scale bloodshed occurring in Darfur still does not seem completely real to me. It is difficult to imagine such devastation actually takes place when everything similar I’d seen is fake, and when my own life is so far removed from such an all-consuming scale of chaos and tragedy.
Yet violence does not only take place in great campaigns, like the Darfur Genocide; and I’ve begun to think I am not only desensitized to such large-scale brutalities. I am numb not only because of the movies I’ve seen, but because my suburban, American way of life encourages emotional isolation. For the most part, I don’t know my neighbors; I don’t see humanity behind the tinted windows of the cars I encounter everyday; I often buy products without considering their human or environmental cost; and my steady intake of media only serves to numb me further.
Because our lifestyle does not encourage emotional connection, and real brutality seems fake, it is all too easy for all of us to commit small acts of hate and violence: to drive recklessly behind our tinted windows, to remain apathetic about the workers who produce the products we buy, to silently stereotype based on race and gender, to offend and to ignore. When we are culturally trained to ignore the emotional pain of our coworkers and neighbors, it is natural to forgot people across the globe are suffering; it is understandable to forget that they even exist.
I commit violence everyday without even noticing; I think we all do. Yet we all have the ability to end injustices as well as commit them. But we first must acknowledge we are numb. The way to end the Darfur Genocide is to examine our own daily acts of inhumanity, to confront the immediate and non-fiction nature of violence. Only once we have empathy for our neighbors, will we have empathy for people in Darfur. And only where there is emotion can there be action.
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