Save Darfur

The most effective television spot I've seen for a long time is devilishly simple: it is comprised of a number of "people like us"--mostly white, but also Latino and African-American--reading briefly from horrific accounts of black Africans caught in the savagery of Darfur.

To hear a white person say he watched a spouse being raped, and then burned, cuts through the automatic numbness of our inability to understand how this can be happening. The actions are so unbelievable--so foreign to our own lives or even what we can imagine in a place like Iraq--that to see fleeting images of it happening to people we almost never see on our televisions--is incomprehensible. It's too much.

The genocide in Darfur but also in neighboring areas is overwhelming, and we hear almost nothing about it. At times like these, it becomes important to find something we can do.

This simple ad was created for an organization called Save Darfur, which is a coalition of faith-based and humanitarian organizations. Because we have all turned away from seeing this for so long, awareness is the necessary first step to effective international action.

This is a good time, because it seems action is possible. Here are some of the actions you can take, to become a voice for Darfur.

As those of us in the U.S. give thanks for what we have, let us remember that the ripples of injustice, need and violence go far across the seas to a place where great beauty and the worst humans seem capable of coexist in a heartbreaking land. Wearing a wristband, or sending an email isn't much. But it's not nothing.