awareness bit

i am a daily visitor of cnn.com nowadays. trying to follow any kind of movement on the (U.S.) immigration debate is all. but a week ago, george clooney's name caught my attention and i clicked on it curiously. turns out he is promoting awareness on the violent killings in sudan (africa) that has been going on for awhile now.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict:
The Darfur Conflict is an ongoing conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan, mainly between the Janjaweed, a militia group recruited from local Arab tribes, and the non-Arab peoples of the region. The Sudanese government, while publicly denying that it supports the Janjaweed, is providing arms and assistance and has participated in joint attacks with the group. The conflict began in February 2003.

The conflict has been described by the Western media as "ethnic cleansing" and "genocide." In September 2004, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated 50,000 deaths in Darfur since the conflict's beginning, mostly by starvation. In October, the organization's head gave an estimate of 71,000 deaths by starvation and disease alone between March and October 2004. While a recent British Parliamentary Report estimates that over 300,000 people have already died, [1] the United Nations estimates that 180,000 have died in the past eighteen months of the conflict. [2] More than 1.8 million people had been displaced from their homes. Two hundred thousand have fled to neighboring Chad.

...criticized for sensationalizing the conflict into one of racial motivations, where some experts instead attribute the causes to competition between farmers and nomadic cattle-herders who compete for scarce resources...

...intervention by the UN is unlikely as the governments of key members of the Security Council are pragmatically and ideologically constrained in their ability to respond to the conflict...

=> Russia is preoccupied with his own security problems and US is busy fighting his war in Iraq. i think the sentiment goes like this: "paano ko matutulungan ang kapwa ko kung ako mismo hindi pa ayos ang sarili kong mga problema?"

...a strong lobby exists opposed to intervention in countries whose internal strife is not clearly related to the nation's own interest...

=> of course: "anong mapapala ko sa pakikialam? sarili nilang gulo yan." i also remember a scene from the movie black hawk down, where the americans were being told that they had no business in somalia's civil war. so it goes both ways: "labas kayo dito, wala kayong kinalaman sa away namin."

BUT!

...Janjaweed are also said to have torched dozens of mosques and torn up and defecated on copies of the Qur'an... Both sides have been accused of committing serious human rights violations, including mass killing, looting, and rapes of the civilian population... dismemberment and killing of noncombatants and even young children and babies...

we have to recognize the hierarchy of our values, people! i know things can get so messed up and can reach the point of total chaos and turmoil. even in my own life, i can easily drop into the confusion of everything that is beyond my control. i can even destroy the things i love (coelho reference - the valkyries). but as bad as everything can lead to, all i ask is that we do not lose hope. even if we do not know what to do to help. even if the situation seems to be just a story for us. even if it's too idealistic to believe that someone as ordinary as me can contribute significantly in an issue as big as the darfur genocide. we can start with keeping our eyes open. opportunities will present themselves, i know it.

sometimes, things just hit you. for me, it started with simply being a fan of clooney. i don't really care for the news in general. and i'm thinking we don't really have to. we can start with what's in our lives right now. like this morning, i just watched the interpreter coz i like sean penn and nicole kidman. the request is for the experience not to stop with what we know and what we are comfortable with. it doesn't have to be this genocide. or the screwed up philippine government. or even the occasional politics and management concerns in our respective jobs. just start with a passion. no matter how small. and hopefully, we can all eventually have a mindset that will help lead to something akin to world peace and deep gladness within.

tonight i'm going to watch ER. i don't mind seeing noah wyle and goran visnjic, but more so because i need an image to go with all this darfur research i did.

from http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2006-05-03-er_x.htm
...the advantage of (informing) through an entertainment program is that it makes it a little more palatable to the audience than it might be in a news story...