sickened

Posted March 22nd, 2005 by Michelle

One of the most truthful lines in the movie “Hotel Rwanda” was when a fuzzy-faced Joaquin Phoenix says “I think people will watch this footage and say, ‘oh, that’s terrible’, and go back to eating their dinner.” Phoenix’s character had just captured footage of militant Hutus hacking Tutsis with machetes. The movie is, actually, relatively tame in its depiction of the horrors of the Rwandan genocide. Tame in a respectful way; the filmmakers didn’t go for gore, they went for story, and I thank them, because had there been just the slightest bit more hacking, I simply would not have made it through. I have a pretty good idea what happened in Rwanda in ’94, and my memory and research of those events filled out the movie for me more than I might have wished.

And then, today, driving to work, I hear about the student in Minnesota who gunned down 9 people in his school, and possibly his own grandparents. Will everyone in this country hear about it, shake their heads, and go back to whatever they were doing before? Our asswipe president is trying to intervene to waylay Terri Schiavo’s wishes, but will he actually *do* anything about the student who shoots his peers? Will anyone? Driving to work, I wondered if I should go into politics, but does anything actually get done? Would the change I’d want to affect ever actually happen? Will anyone take responsibility for any of this?

When Bill Clinton was on Larry King, he was asked what the greatest mistake of his presidency was. “Personal mistake or presidential mistake?” Clinton said. “We all know my biggest personal mistake.” He smiled and then said that not intervening in Rwanda was the greatest mistake of his presidency. Little comfort, but a rare moment in American history. And what must the Rwandans feel today, when we have a president who spends billions of dollars to invade a country under false allegations? Why haven’t we done anything about Darfur?

I suppose it’s no surprise that my country cares little about brown people overseas, when it shrink-wraps its own tragedies to fit neatly in the evening news and then flushes them down the toilet of our consciousness. How long will anyone be talking about Red Lake High School, except as reference when the next shooting occurs?

And what can I do about any of this?