Lawrence.com

Posted by Josh Robbins May 26, 2006 at 12:12 p.m.

"Never again," so say we all...again and again and again.

![][1]If you're like me and you're following what has unfolded and is unfolding in Darfur, your head is spinning, your heart is broken, and the once consoling and optimistically repeated exhortation of "never again" uttered by our leaders after Bosnia and Kosovo and Rwanda now sounds like so much white noise.But how else to respond to numbers like 400,000 dead and 3.5 million people displaced? Statistics leave one feeling abstracted and detached. I'm reminded of an incisive line by Charles Wright that simply asks: "What do I do with all of this?" And besides, it's extremely difficult to marshal the imagination necessary to encounter evil when you're protected by oceans, liberty, and American prosperity.At the same time, because this is the reality of our lives in America we, as a result, have an existentially radical responsibility to make a choice in the face of evil: either bare witness or sink further into self-involved apathy.Personally, I have yet to encounter any poems that grapple with atrocities in Darfur though I am confident they are out there and that it is just a matter of time. But until then, let me offer a poem by Jane Hirshfield that bares witness to another recent evil, the genocide in Rwanda during the mid-1990s in which 800,000 were killed. 8,000 people butchered per day while the world watched.Manners/RwandaThey took the woman and tied to one arm a child to the other arm a child to one leg a child to the other leg a child- you also read this in the paper- and threw them all in. No marks of damage, not one of the five bodies, which means of course that they drowned, which means of course that she knew. The river made its way from higher ground toward lower and carried them with decorum, the way a river does, it carries what it is given, and because in the night a border was crossed, what was given then was taken out with a pole. It may have been untied before being added to the tally sheet with others and given next to the quicklime and earth, but probably not. There it will likely stay, where it was carried, the last contact with anything living a hand's continuing rising, almost a waving, almost a plea, letting go after rolling it in. The two beats of its fall almost gentle, a door being carefully opened, quietly closed. And though you too are sickened, as even the river is sickened, undrinkable now with the human heart, you also carry what you were given with decorum. Perhaps reminded later by something mentioned only in passing- a large family, a cat's toy of string- you stop smiling a moment soon. Across the table someone notices, but does not speak. You watch his question rise and seem to waver like a hand about to act, a hand about to change its mind, then drop politely away.To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, we are blessed to live in a place where everything is decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence. We can either bare witness or sink further into ignorance. Yet the world cannot afford for us to be cavalier with language. Doing so leads to confusion, confusion leads to ignorance, and ignorance to apathy.To refer, as I've often heard the uninformed and right-wing do, to the loss of life resulting from two planes striking two American skyscrapers as "war crimes" or to call it an act of "genocide" is unconscionable and outrageous. It is a direct consequence of the vast, generous heart of the American people being divvied up and sacrificed to the latest sensation, be it fear and terrorism, Iraq and Iran, gas prices, domestic spying, Branjelina, or American Idol. With so many places to put our attention, is it any wonder Darfur doesn't get much airtime? Perhaps one ought not be so angered by the apathy of our communities and politicians?On the other hand, so many people in the world don't have the luxury of choice. But we do. If you know what's going on you can bare witness through any number of ways. Pick up the phone, tell someone about an article, start an e-mail group, write your government leaders, make a donation, put a sticker on your car, make a painting, write an essay, share a poem. It all adds up. The world cannot afford to have our hands rise in action only to have them "drop politely away."So as we try to wrap our TV-blistered brains around a problem as complex as an actual genocide that the powers-that-be swore would never happen again, and as we try to find ways to speak out and act up, remember this: every week since 2003, civilians in Darfur are killed by bullets, starvation, fire, machetes, gang rape, bombs, and apathy. For them, every day is 9/11.+++For more information on Darfur or to get involved, please visit these sites:http://www.savedarfur.org/situation http://www.darfurgenocide.org http://www.nytimes.com/packages/khtml/2004/10/20/opinion/20041020_DARFUR_FEATURE.html http://www.tnr.com/darfur/+++Acknowledgements"Manners/Rwanda" from The Lives of the Heart by Jane Hirshfield. Copyright © 1997 by Jane Hirshfield. [1]: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2005/02/22/opinion/KRISTOF.slide.3.jpg