Please, Don't Let This Happen Again!

by: Thurman Hart

Sun Apr 02, 2006 at 06:15:02 PM EDT

Wrong.  The rest of this post was written by one of my students at Montclair State University. 

  Sometimes I ask myself, “is it even worth it, to try to progress the human race? Do things ever change?” Sometimes I feel like saying, “You know what, why even bother? It’s like peace will never exist because after all, we’re just humans, and that’s all a part of our human nature.” If that is the case, that the value of human life is so worthless, (the case I do not want to believe) then the rest of it all makes sense to my answers…

Why didn’t anybody care that 800,000 people were murdered in 3 months in Rwanda? Was it because we live in a world so different and far away from others that it just wouldn’t affect us? Or was it because we had no idea what was going on in a world we couldn’t even imagine living in? I was 12 years old when the genocide in Rwanda took place. When I learned about it about 2 years ago, I was confused, in shock and depressed. It was the same way I felt when I learned about the Holocaust, and the Native American Trail of Tears.

  I do not want to believe that no one intervened during Rwanda’s genocide because there was not enough interest to stop it. I do not want to believe that the world stood present, watching a planned extermination of an entire population. And I do not want to believe that my children will read in their history books that genocide existed in my generation. However, I do want to believe that my children will read how my generation made history, by stopping genocide.

In the western Sudan of Africa in Darfur, despair is seen in the eyes of more than 2 million struggling people who have nothing to hold on to but their broken lives. In the past 2 years, they have been surrounded by war, death, and the murder of more than 300,000 people.  Because I’m not 12 years old anymore, and I know what’s going on, I have no excuse to sit back and watch this happen again, letting society take 2 steps back.

  In the response to the genocide in Rwanda, President Bush said, “Not on my watch.” I just want make sure that he meant what he had said.

“You can make a difference.”

How many times have we all heard that one? Well it’s the truth.

I ask you to stand up and make history with me. Raise awareness, cry out and let your voice be heard, if the value of human life means anything to you at all. Tell the President that you’re not okay with letting genocide happen again. Go to SaveDarfur.Org to send the President a postcard (our goal is to send 1 million). Join my colleagues and I, as we rally all afternoon on the Montclair State University Campus in New Jersey,  Tuesday, April 4th, in the town of Montclair, NJ on Watchung Plaza, Sunday, April 9th between 2:00-3:30, and in Washington DC, Sunday April 30th. The President will hear your voice and the voices of hundreds of thousands of Americans nationwide who refuse to be bystanders any longer.

P. Healy