Valentine’s Day
Feb 14th, 2006 by jimmoore
Ingid Jones today offers the world a valentine. It is incredibly beautiful and sad, and you really should read it.
First, let me say that St. Valentine’s day can be about love in the
most inclusive form, love for each other, for sure, but love for all of
us, together, and–as the Buddhists say–”love for all sentient beings.”
Let’s take back Valentine’s day from the jewelers, from the card
makers, and from the sellers of expensive meals in cheesy bars…
And let’s extend Valentine’s day to the least of us around the
world. In the case of Ingrid, and me, and Joanne/Fishweasel, and
so many others, this includes those who suffer today in Sudan.
So long ago now, Joanne wrote an essay, The Passion of the Present,
that was posted on a simple site on the Internet, and circulated widely
on email lists through informal networks of concerned
people–importantly including Joanne’s sister Mary Fran, an activist
Catholic.
Ingrid Jones was probably the first blogger on earth to blog for those
in Sudan. She has been remarkably faithful, running her own
blogs, including Sudan Watch, helping to found with several of us, including me and Joanne, the group blog Sudan: The Passion of the Present.
Ingrid has provided consistent care, hope and needed cheer within a
tragic and perhaps endless campaign to end just one particular genocide.
The bad news–very bad–is that we learned a great deal about the
limits of public opinion to change history, at least this history. We
really did believe that we might be able to stop a genocide. As
Ingrid reports, when we started the death toll was reported to be
10,000. Now it is at least 400,000. Probably more.
The only thing that limits the actual death toll is that the victims
are spread widely across a large geographical area, so they are
difficult to completely exterminate. On the other hand, this same
dispersal makes keeping an accurate count very diffcult, and terrible
things can happen where no one but the victims and the criminals
witness.
The good news is that many of us have concluded that we cannot stop
particular genocides, but perhaps we can stop genocide. The Genocide Intervention Network has been born of this idea.