Does anyone care if nobody cares? Billie Joe Armstrong asks in Green Day's rock opera, American Idiot.
No
Jeffrey Smith answers in a mandated-but-willingly-done piece of opinion-page fodder.
When I read that Green Day lyric - an honest, stinging question about American apathy - I forgave the generalization of my countrymen and acknowledged how cold we can be with a quiet no.
But we do care! the mob shouts, vigorously pointing to the relief workers.
Well, yeah, CNN's not lying to us.
People are sacrificing their time and energy for strangers. And don't get me wrong, any degree of charity should be commended. But Americans don't do nearly enough to curb human suffering, and it makes me sick the amount of back-patting that surrounds a disaster's cleanup. Especially when we put little to no collective effort into its prevention - reinforcing levees, evacuation, etc. A hurricane destroys a city and our hearts bleed us into action. Where's the countrywide crusade to alleviate poverty in the inner city or in Appalachia? Why is it that we sit by and watch our loved ones fill their arteries with cholesterol, and then cry only when their hearts give out? The Sudanese government has killed 400,000 men, women and children in the country's western, Texas-sized Darfur region. For two and a half years, Khartoum has commissioned a band of demons on horsebacks - the Janjaweed - to rape, pillage and burn villages. Of the dead, those who had survived the bombings, shooting and pyres perished in the ensuing lack of food and shelter.
Why has our pro-life president not jumped at the opportunity to halt what he himself has called genocide? It must be eating him up as an evangelical Christian. I doubt the president's conflicted because Sudan poses no threat to the United States.
And it's not that we're overstretched. After Sept. 11, the Sudanese government uprooted a vast Al-Qaeda network and sent them packing at the mere mention of U.N. sanctions. If the United States flew a crop-duster with an American flag over Khartoum, the killing would stop tomorrow.
If President Bush really wanted to, he could militate the country - maybe the world - against Khartoum, but the fact is, Sudan President Omar al-Bashir didn't try to kill his dad.
Furthermore, almost none of Bush's constituents - that's us - know anyone from Darfur. So what does it matter to us if total strangers are being slaughtered? That happens all the time in Africa, it's never bothered us before. What does it matter to me whether the villagers there are being ravaged to ruin? So what if children there are making crayon drawings of executions? If I've got 16 credit hours, a job and a guitar to keep my mind elsewhere, it's no weight on my conscience.
More than simply being apathetic, some people will even deter you from spreading knowledge to protect their bubble. Several times when people have asked me about my Save Darfur wrist band - one of the dark green ones - I've explained the killing and been asked to stop by an eavesdropper.
Is it pathetic to feel inconvenienced by the mention of global events, as I initially thought? I'm not so sure now.
Why is it that we feel compassion for anyone outside of our friends and family? PETA set me on that line of thought last week. I've never had any qualms with using my incisors and canines on dead animals. When you look at how animals are kept and killed, however, you realize the issue lies in unnecessary suffering - with which I do have a problem.
Why then, am I not leading a march on Washington to enact change? Because I don't see the little chicks' beaks get cut off with a hot knife as they squeak in a kind of pain I hope never to experience. If I woke up every morning to a picture of that on my wall or in my newspaper, I wouldn't be eating chicken.
I guess If something's on TV, people care about it. It's a shame that pressing issues and news don't make for good television. Of course, television news wouldn't have stopped reporting those things if it didn't make people change the channel. Which, of course, makes advertisers stop feeding the channel. So perhaps if people didn't neglect their responsibility to inform themselves as voting decision-makers in a globalized world ... what does it matter, though; nobody cares.
But if you do, you owe it to yourself to get involved. Go to www.savedarfur.org.
- Jeffrey Smith is the senior copy editor for The Post. Send him an e-mail at js225203@ohiou.edu. 17
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