Darfur

I try to do my best to keep abreast of what's going on in the world, even if at times it can be totally overwhelming, depressing, heart wrenching, and soul crushing. There are far too many things in this world that are not as they should be, many profound injustices. The steady unrelenting march of news stories filled with accounts of murder, massacres, torture, bombings, imprisonments, and a litany of other abuses can be numbing in its monotony. The reality of wars that have been seen to take tens of thousands of lives has, I'm sorry to say, become commonplace, a seemingly normal, unavoidable aspect of humanity. It isn't very often I can learn of something I would have deemed unimaginable, a cruel relic of some past age, but which is being perpetrated as we speak (or more properly as I type and you read), and while the entire world turns a blind eye. I had heard of what's going on in Darfur, and I thought that I had a good, if broad, understanding of what was happening there. I had no idea the magnitude of the scale of that genocide, it can only properly be called holocaustal. Using Google Earth to get an aerial view of that region, and the immensity of the criminal slaughter becomes starkly apparent. To see where thousands upon thousands of villages, schools, homes, mosques, etc., have been levelled, is to see how horrific it really is. Being able to go from a vantage point where you can take in that entire region, on down to being able to discern the remnants of individual buildings is a singularly eye opening, yet gut wrenching experience. It allows you to gain an appreciation of what it means to say 400,000 people have been killed, and another 2,500,000 have been forced from their homes. How the world can stand back and do nothing more than condemn it using words not nearly approaching the strength or harshness that the situation calls for, is beyond my comprehension. I can't even begin to understand why we do this, why people find it necessary to judge someone inferior on account of their race, and deserving of execution. These things have always been a part of the world, and will probably always continue to be a part of it. I don't know if there's a more disheartening thought than that.