Never again, huh?

After the Holocaust the entire world sat in stunned, solemn silence and vowed, as a species, "Never again."

But then...

The governments of the world turned a blind eye to the Killing Fields of Cambodia, where over 2 million people died through starvation, torture or execution.

The governments of the world ignored the brutal murders of over 800,000 Rwandans, instead choosing to argue semantics, debating whether or not the situation warranted use of the term "genocide."

The governments of the world allowed the systematic extermination of humans to continue for years in Serbia and Bosnia before anything was done.

And once again, we see the governments of the world doing nothing while hundreds of thousands of people are slaughtered. The situation in Darfur is horrendous. Over 400,000 people have died in the last three years since the crisis began (that's the entire population of the state of Wyoming). Famine is just around the corner. Already 3.5 million people are now going hungry in Darfur and another 2.5 million have been displaced due to violence. It's been going on for THREE YEARS and the world has done next to nothing. The governments of the world need to act...the people of the world need to act. We all need to act...now!

There are many organizations out there right now that give us all many different ways we can help. Here's one. Please do something. Learn about it. Read about it. Talk about it. I've even got a little Google search bar on this site that you can use to look up the facts about the situation if you need to.

Use the word genocide...it's a powerful word that evokes powerful emotions and demands powerful actions. It is completely appropriate for Darfur. The more people talk about it, the more people will care about doing something. At the very least, sign a petition in support of helping the people of Sudan and tell our governments that we want them to act...we need them to act.

Again and again and again world leaders condemn genocide AFTER the fact. Rarely do any of them ever do anything to stop it before, or while, it happens. It's time to change that. It's time for the current administration to end the hypocracy.

So, here's a message for our President from my lonely corner of the blogosphere...

Mr. Bush,

You want so much to rid the world of "evildoers," to end tyranny and suffering, and "spread freedom and democracy"...

Well now is the time to step up the plate, Cowboy.

Show the world that you care about more than oil. Demonstrate through action that the lives of the poorest people of one of the world's poorest nations mean as much to you as those others you claim to care so much about (whose homes happen to rest atop vast reseviors of "black gold") and whom you're willing to rack up the largest national debt in the history of the human species in order to "help."

You are the leader of arguably the most powerful nation the world has ever seen. There is no one else on the planet capable of doing more to help the people of Sudan than you. You can stop the genocide in Darfur. You must stop the genocide in Darfur.

Make those of us who think you are nothing more than a pawn of Big Oil and a puppet of the military eat our words. Save the lives of these people, who have nothing to offer us in return but their gratitude, and demonstrate to us that you're not the hypocrite we all think you are.

Prove all of us wrong, President Bush. Please prove us wrong.

Stop the genocide in Darfur!

Signed,
Paul Ollig
Seward, Alaska