OurPledge

“Now Mr. Bashir is preparing to kill people en masse, not with machetes but by withholding the aid that keeps them alive.” – Nicholas Kristof, March 7, 2009

The words above were published about one month ago. We need to revisit them. Indeed, we’d do well to revisit Nick Kristof’s entire Op-Ed about the drastic endgame that Omar al-Bashir has imposed on more than one million displaced Darfuris.

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On one of our office walls, we’ve posted this reminder on a big drawing pad: “Always: Combine practical skills with moral imagination.” It’s a line that I read some time ago on the website of the Acumen Fund.

Now more than ever, we need to enlarge our moral imaginations in order to transform empathy and sympathy into advocacy for Sudan. That is, put yourself in their shoes:

- Your son has not eaten in so many days because the Sudanese government has decided to sever your only access to food.
- You’ve lost your mother and father already and now you face losing your entire family to an outbreak of disease.
- Your daughter was raped by the Sudanese government’s proxy militias. And now Khartoum has decided to let your daughter starve to death.

These are real-time descriptions: they capture in small part the inner and outer lives — the immense amount of suffering — that countless Darfuris bear today.

Faced with this, it’s of course easy to shunt our moral responsibilities. And when we turn a blind eye, we always have the luxury of an excuse: Nothing can be done. The political situation is impossible. Our leaders don’t care, especially since they have a world economy to save.

But these are excuses. When we use them, we forget the ordinary people who struggled before us and against the heaviest of odds. They fought against slavery and apartheid, and against the deepest and the widest of oppressions. They were eminently practical in their organizing — they were pragmatists of conscience, if you will — but in their worldliness they managed to create social movements on a global scale. And they changed the world.

We here at AADG/OurPledge.org are immensely grateful to the Sudan advocacy movement. This is a challenging time, and we know that it is difficult to ramp up now and inspire new engagement and re-engagement, six years into the Darfur genocide. But we must. We must speak out like never before. We must organize our communities like never before. And we must speak truth to power and always remember who we’re fighting for.