I don't have much time to write a thourough, polished diary so this might seem like a major rant. Still, I think its definitely something that needs to be said.
Are you a proud Democrat like me? Because if you are, I hope you are also just as outraged as I am right now. I have not checked Dkos periodically throughout the day but it seems like there have been an awful lot of diaries about Stephen Colbert and his hilarious performance at the WH correspondants dinner last night. Easily the most talked about story of the day.
I have nothing against Mr. Colbert and I especially have no problem with kossacks talking about his supberb "smackdown" of Bush last night. But here's something to think about:
4000,000 dead in the little known region of Darfur, Sudan. Today, an estimated 50,000 showed up in Washington DC to protest the genoicde. I see that many people have diaried about it today. The most recent one received 43 comments, which isn't bad at all. But compared to all the diaries about Colbert ending up on the Rec. list??? I think there are much more important things to talk about.
Perhaps I'm being juvenile to evaluate a diaries success over the number of comments it receives, but there's no denying that people were more fired up about Colbert than Darfur. Again, this is not a jab at Colbert. It just happens to be today's comparatively meaningless story that is preventing any attention given to Darfur.
I understand that this is a Democratic, political blog and not humanrightswatch.com. I don't want everyone's diary on here to be about an African humanitiarian crisis. But those 400,000 dead in Darfur have died at the hands of both an inumane Sudanese govt. and a silent, international community. If you have any moral compass, whatsoever, American policy on Darfur should be very important to you.
I am just as guilty of this apathy epidemic in the liberal blogosphere as anyone else. Until I heard about the D.C. protest this morning, I hadn't pursued information on Dafur in weeks, perhaps even months.
Just last year, a friend of mine and I led a very successful awareness campaign at our highschool about Darfur. We flew in two Darfurian Americans living in Brooklyn down here to Oklahoma and they each gave an amazing personal account of the horrors of genocide. Each man has lost multiple family members. When we asked one man about his wife, his response was, "She's in Chad" which implies that she is one of the many DArfurian refugees living in deplorable conditions across the border.
Yet only weeks afterward, I drowned into that fatal pool of apathy. I reset my homepage from savedarfur.org to nfl.com. In place of my passion for Darfur, I adopted other more local causes like opposing hr 4437. As much as I hate to admit it, my passion for Darfur was history.
But after hearing about the thousands of people that turned out for the protest in DC this afternoon, and watching the blogospheres lukewarm reaction, Darfur is once again on my mind. I hope everyone who reads this can take the time to visit savedarfur.org and perhaps make a donation to Doctors Without Borders. Just think if a widely read blog like Dkos could champion Darfur like we've been doing with Ned Lamont's senatorial campaign. We sure as hell would make a difference.
Time is ticking. I'm not going to let apathy kill 400,000 more people, which would match the death toll of the Rwandan genocide. The hands of our govt. are already covered in blood. Let's try to cleanse them by giving Darfur the attention it deserves.