Thursday, July 01, 2004

I'm sitting here listening to Democracy Now with Amy Goodman (which a local college station airs right after Morning Edition on NPR) and there's no notice of what's going on in Darfur -- while there is plenty of notice of other things that the U.S. has done wrong (or supposedly done wrong). I am curious about her priorities. She calls her program the "War and Peace Report" and calls for "Resistance to the Rulers" -- doesn't what's going on in Darfur qualify as part of the "War" report? Or is it less important because it doesn't involve the United States government doing anything? There's always plenty on her program about Iraq, or about injustices done in the United States. To continue in this line of thought -- why hasn't MoveOn.org taken up the cause of Darfur? Why is there no sustained action on the left about Darfur? I signed up on Meetup.com for the Sudanese Peace meetup, coming up this Monday, July 5 -- but in this area it was cancelled because not enough people signed up.

I remember the civil war and massive starvation in Biafra, Nigeria in the late 1960s -- it was the first genocide that I was aware of when I was a child. My elementary school raised over $1,000 to send to help starving refugees in Biafra. As I recall, there was much press coverage at the time about what was going on in Biafra. I remember reading about the Ibo, who had rebelled against the central government in Nigeria. Have we simply gotten tired of thinking about starving people in Africa -- who in most cases are starving not because of a genuine lack of food, but because of war or deliberate ethnic cleansing?

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