Darfur

Right now, iTunes has an NBC news special on the crisis in the Sudan* available for free download.  Since I’m all about things I can listen to for free, I downloaded it.  I’m not usually one who jumps on every bandwagon that comes along, but this really touched me.

Beyond the systematic extermination of people through murder and rape (because no one will marry a woman who has been raped, so the people won’t reproduce), what struck me in this segment were some comments about our government.  I’m not quoting exactly, but they said something approximating, “Just like the Clinton administration with Rwanda, the Bush administration doesn’t want to bring up the conflict in the Sudan because they don’t know how to fix it.”

Now, I know that politics are important, and that we are in a culture that doesn’t understand that sometimes there just aren’t easy solutions, but to not acknowledge a suffering people because you can’t make it all better and so people won’t like you as much seems horribly selfish.   The courageous route seems to be acknowledging the problem, and the difficulty of the problem, and saying, “We don’t know how to help.  We don’t know what will work, but we want to work with you to solve it, or to alleviate some of the suffering.”

It disturbs me that, by and large, we are a nation that can’t deal with unsolvable problems.  We face them everywhere.  I read somewhere recently that every marriage has a handful of problems that won’t be solved, and that the best thing to do is identify them and figure out how you can deal with them as a team, so that you don’t argue on, ad infitem, about them, and end up resentful of each other.  The fact that we, as a culture, just don’t see any problem that we can’t solve makes me shudder.  That, and the fact that fewer people would be suffering if we were willing to try out solutions that may or may not work.
*It was seeing pictures and comments in the back of a Newsweek about this crisis that first opened me (at all!) to relief and social justice work.  I hadn’t really been interested before, but they had this picture with a comment about how most Americans would never really know what happened there, particularly how terrible it was, because they wouldn’t go and there was no way to communicate it in words.  I realized then how important it is for us to try, to try to understand, even if we can’t, because if we don’t have any understanding, we won’t care enough to try to change anything.