Somebody ought to do something

That line has been bothering me lately, because the human tendency is to care enough to say that, but believing someone else should or will do something. Especially when the tragedy that has captured our attention – momentarily – is very far away, in a foreign land.

I’ll never forget a line from the film “Hotel Rwanda” when the military officer played by Nick Nolte looked at the Rwandan businessman desperately looking for help saving people in the genocide. Nolte said ‘you know, people in America will look at these scenes on their TVs and say “that’s terrible,” and then go back to eating their dinner. That sums up this predicament: feeling human compassion, but being so preoccupied with the stuff of your own life that you wish someone would fix it. And you don’t know what you’d do, anyway, against something so massive and so far away…

That’s Darfur, among other places. The Vatican has been focusing attention on that humanitarian crisis, among other places in the world. But they’re sort of saying ‘for crying out loud’ (my words), we have to do something.

The Vatican’s permanent representative at UN offices in Geneva has indicated concern about the lack of international action to resolve the crisis in Darfur, the Fides news service reports.

“For three years already the Holy See has been following with grave concern the terrible suffering of the people caught up in the tragic conflicts intermittently erupting in the Darfur region of Sudan,” Archbishop Silvano M. Tomasi, told the 4th special session of the Human Rights Council in Geneva on the theme “The Human Rights Situation in Darfur.” ?“The situation on the ground, as a variety of official and private first hand witnesses indicates, shows a horrific violation of human rights: killing of children, sexual abuse and rape of girls and women, forced uprooting of population, burning of villages, attacks on Internally Displaced People (IDP) camps, targeting of unarmed civilians,” the archbishop continued underlining long-term consequences: “disruption of agriculture greatly limits the production of food; inter-group relations will be more difficult to heal; the danger of regional destabilization increases; traumatized refugees find it harder to start life again.”

The U.N. should be doing more, but they’ve been ineffective all over the world. There have been conferences on this ongoing crisis, but while people talk, mass numbers of people are living and dying brutally.

The urgent task is stopping the violence, the destruction, the impunity. The victims are not just statistics; they are real people. Indeed the priority is action to end the killings and the abuses over political arrangements and commercial interests.”

“The crisis under discussion has provoked debates and international complaints, but insufficient effective actions, the Holy See’s observer said.

So what can any of us do right now? You can go here, for starters.