Hotel Rwanda

Movies like this leave my mind reeling with questions.
Not just the usual ones brought on by the horror of mankind's actions, those questions made pointedly by bodies on the road as far as he can see, speedbumps on a 'cleared road' (cleared of the living). How could anyone do this, to be so consumed by hatred or anger that the normal restraints are completely absent.

Or the big questions like what makes people so different in their response to horror that some risk their lives repeatedly to help while others give in to what looks like mass hysteria and hack up their neighbors? And of course the personalization of that question in: given the same situation how would i react?

We have seen the main pieces over and over again since the British concentration camps for the Boer women and children in 1899, the Armenia genocide with its thousands perishing in the desert or lost in harem sexual exploitation for a lifetime. The destruction of Yugoslavia in an orgasm of violence, rape hotels and the eventual partitioning of history and geography back 50 years. It has happened so many times, in so many places that we get emotional callouses over our hearts to protect us from the immediate horror of it all. But the survivors, they will never heal, will never have the luxury of developing a hard heart to the evils of mankind. They will never close their eyes without reliving the nightmare.

But after all these questions have settled down to a dull aching roar, i am left with the idea that to honor, to remember these dead is to strive to keep it from happening again. To understand how such things erupt in our midst, to think about the warning signs and to struggle to push the powers that rule to build strike forces or international police forces or what ever it takes so that this evil leaves our midst forever. The radio in the background, urging violence, dehumanizing "The Other" into cockroaches, making great divisions where there were little to none before (nose width???) certainly is significant. Mob violence, herd mentality explains part, but what about that man on the radio, or more importantly the few leaders behind the masks of evil, who are they and how did society create them. And more importantly, how do we keep trash thought from rising to the surface of society and causing this? I see the same kind of racism, the same kind of demonization of others, of the cockroachizition in the decline of dialogue into nothing more than utter polarization and namecalling around me.

Article Author: Richard Williams

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