Thinking about Rwanda

I remember the film footage on the news twelve years ago, the horrid refugee camps tortured by cholera.

The news story had it wrong.

It suggested that a catastrophic disaster had occurred, and that these starving and thirsty people had fled to safety.

But that is not what we were seeing. We were witnessing the mass exodus of the killers, the Hutus, after the mass execution of the Tsutsis. The television reporters suggested that a humanitarian effort was needed to provide them with food and water and medicine. That someone need to step in and offer aid.

That was only partially true.

The truth buried below that image is far more nefarious.

The Hutus were exiting their country at the end of a mass slaughter that they had carried out against their own countrymen. They had left their fields and marshes and rivers and lakes flooded with bodies. A massacre of inexplicably Biblical proportions, if such is even accurate. The genocide of almost one million in two months.

The US did not enter the fray when the genocide broke out because they were not willing to call the monstrous acts of murder "genocide." If they were to call it a genocide, then they were compelled by UN resolution to act.

We did not act. Instead, we parsed words. We hid behind semantics as a political ploy.

Seeing "Hotel Rwanda" and reading Machete Season and We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families makes you open your eyes to history and issues of justice and truth.

Who do we hold accountable for the murder of this one million?

And for the human suffering in the wake of that genocide, by the survivors, by the Hutus and the Tsutsis both who have been decimated?

How do we look in the mirror when we think of Africans dying when we sendf troops to Serbia but accept the terrible crime in our own cities? How do we justify waging war in Iraq when we are killing ourselves here?

History, Baldwin wrote, is a nightmare from which we are always awaking.

9/11 was a catastrophic tragedy. But Americans do not hold the corner on the market of suffering.

How is it that we allow so much suffering to our own people, and yet we are willing to capriciously choose who we will fight and who we will ignore.

We must begin to realize that our sympathy is guided by often unannounced geopolitical gain.

Like all empires, America is in a desperate struggle to hold onto its control and power.

We should admit this.

It is not unAmerican or unpatriotic to speak or think the truth. In fact, it is unpatriotic and unAmerican to NOT speak the truth. We are a country that is formed on the value of dissent. We are a country that values free thinking and openmindedness. That is what is most worth protecting in the face of attack.

How we ever got into the position of thinking that we could import democracy and download our values and build a new westernized nation from the rubble of bombs is inconceivable.

Our intentions are hugely oversimplified and naive.

But perhaps that ignorance, that blindness, is something that power brokers want. I don't think we have the ability to crteate a free and democratic Iraq anymore than we have the stomach to admit to our own national shortcomings in literacy, health care, jobs, homes, decency, and tolerance. We are more comfortable with injustice and maintaining a safe and secure and sanitized status quo.

We don't like questions and we don't like looking in the mirror. We have grown too used to standing over others and demanding something.

Who will take us seriously when we get a conscience about dwindling natural resources? About genocide? About global warming? About justice? Etc. Etc.

Why are we so afraid to think?