History Repeats Itself
“Never again…but I had just come from a place where history was repeating itself.” This is the statement that stood out to me the most at the recent Lehigh lecture by Paul Rusesabagina, whose story is told in the movie, Hotel Rwanda. Mr. Rusesabagina gave the packed Baker Hall auditorium a brief history of the simmering chaos in the decades leading up to the Rwandan genocide in 1994. He then described, in stark detail, the beginning of the carnage in April of that year. He remembers having dinner with his brother-in-law and his wife one evening, shaking hands good-bye that night, and finding out later that they had been killed on their way home. He remembers seeing his wife, whom he had sent along with his four young children to be evacuated, return in the evacuation vehicle beaten so badly they could hardly move for weeks. He remembers the dead bodies lying in scores on the side of the road, many with missing limbs and heads.
This was just the beginning. Within a few months of that April, nearly a million people had been brutally murdered. Five hundred thousand of those were killed in just 100 days. Even if you shake your head in sympathy, these are still just statistics for those of us who have not seen such atrocities firsthand. I have never walked out my front door into an eerily silent street to be met by the smell of the rotting bodies of my neighbors. I have never run into my house in utter fear to contemplate jumping off the roof of my house to save myself from the brutal torture that may well precede an almost certain death. Can any of us even come close to imagining such horrors? To put such carnage into perspective, it would be as if soldiers appeared on the streets of Bethlehem tomorrow and shot down every single resident of the city over the course of the next 2 1/2 weeks!
And yet, people living in Rwanda have experienced this worse-than-nightmare condition on a daily basis. Similarly, countless millions of people did the same 65 years ago, living in a horrific situation as a crazed dictator nearly conquered Europe. Presently, in Sudan, it is happening again. Time after time, history repeats itself. Those people are on the other side of the world though. What can we do? How many of us think subconsciously “well, when this gets cleaned up, it won’t happen again” or “such a thing certainly could not happen in an advanced nation like ours”.
But it will happen again, over and over again. Being an advanced nation only makes the danger more subtle. Humanity is the same. How likely is it that highly educated and technologically advanced nations like ours could ever let something like this happen? Seventy years ago, Germany was home to millions of intelligent humans who were seduced by a cruel dictator who killed over 6 million people in a few years. This utter insanity was bought into by millions of Germans! Our own nation, the land of the free and home of the brave, murders well over a million little babies a year. It is quiet and under the radar, but agonizingly real.
You could put up a fuss about the current genocide in Sudan, as you should. We are young, privileged, and educated. We live in a country with the greatest opportunities in the world open before us. We have the education and intelligence to become people with influence. Stop for a minute and think about something bigger than your bright, cushy future as a Lehigh student. If the task of halting genocide in a culture and place foreign to you seems too far removed, get started right here in your town and on your campus.
Did you know that out of the over 3,500 murders committed every day in the U.S., about 400 of them are instigated by women with annual family incomes of more than $60,000? That’s your peer group! There are people you can influence without stepping out the front door. Another 1,000 are committed by women with family incomes between $30,000 and $60,000 per year. Call it propaganda if you will, but the bare facts are that every single day, just in the US, people with identifiable fingerprints, organs, fingers and toes are killed brutally. Another 1,500+, who are called nonhuman just because someone decided that their fingers and toes are not long enough to qualify them as human (but most of whom still have beating hearts), are massacred. (Statistics from The Alan Guttmacher Institute,1996-2008,. (www.agi-usa.org))
Do something…something to try to stop history from repeating itself as many times as it otherwise would, over and over and over again.
