Student Vigil for Darfur tonight

Sitting on an upturned paint can in the refugee village, idly watching the tattered, mud-smeared gunny sack ripple in the 40-degree breeze, I gazed up at the blinking stars and asked myself a rather difficult question: why did I care about black Sudanese Africans in the western region of Darfur who were being murdered, forced from their homes and raped by government-sanctioned militias? Why did I care if they lived, or if they died?

I speculate, sometimes, about the extreme agony I would suffer if, all of a sudden, a random individual were to take the life of a family member or close friend. It would become my life mission to hunt that person down. Then I sit there and wonder how an 18-year old girl, raped by six men who had just gunned down her two small children, could possibly survive such an ordeal. I couldn’t conceive of a father losing, in one instant, his entire family in the bloody carnage of shrapnel from government-launched missiles.

I considered that many thousands of young girls and fathers, quite far away, might be idly watching a tattered, mud-smeared tarp at that same instant, gazing up at the flickering stars, but asking a very different question: why, me? I was cold in the 40-degree weather, but I was not physically battered, psychologically scarred and materially destitute.

When it came to pain, I thought, my life was certainly bliss. My life was bliss, and the lives of 1.8 million displaced people in Darfur were tormented. What an incomprehensible discrepancy!

My life was bliss, and the lives of 50,000 to 70,000 people were gone, due to government bombs and bullets, starvation and disease. Why, though, should I care? Because, I thought, justice and genocide are both real‹they simply cannot co-exist in the same world.

Come to the National Student Vigil For Darfur at 6 p.m., Thursday, in front of the Chapel and hear first-hand accounts of the genocide. Join the National Student Movement For Darfur with Harvard, Georgetown, the University of Pennsylvania, UNC-Chapel Hill, Emory and others, and defend humanity.

Daniel Kennedy

Trinity’ 05