when will we learn from our mistakes?

I'm quite sad this morning and a little bit angry as well as frustrated by my own indifference.

This summer while I was in Washington DC, I visited the Holocaust Museum and was deeply impacted by what happened and our lack, as a country, of response. Here is a quote from my blog at livejournal about it:

"Another sobering bit was a hall that had the photographs of this one certain community where a photographer had taken photos of people from the 50 years prior to the war... all of the photos lined the wall for two floors - all over. Pictures of kids playing, of people at parties, of weddings... everyday normal pictures. And the majority of those people died in the holocaust. Another section had thousands and thousands of shoes piled... all taken from the concentration camps. The whole thing was so sobering, and frustrating when you saw what little action America took to help... I only hope that we will not let something like that happen again."

Well, I am very sad to say that we are allowing it to happen again - just like we let it happen in Rwanda. Genocide is in our midst - not here in America, but in the midst of our worldwide community. The Arabs in the Sudan are working hard to extinguish the African tribes in Darfur, Sudan. Mass killings, rape, and burnings are taking place every day - with estimations around 500 losing their lives EVERY SINGLE DAY. Genocide. Just like the Jews. And what are we doing about it? Nothing. What is our government doing about it? Nothing. I could blame it on the media and how they don't show us these things on the news and so we are uninformed - which might be partially true, but I really boil it down to indifference... apathy. I praise God that He did not stand by apathetically while His people were in bondage, or in exile... or that He looked the other way when I was dying in my sin. When will we look past our own comfortable lives and become followers of Christ and act on the injustices in this world? I don't want to meet Jesus at His throne and have Him say that I didn't give Him something to eat or give Him clothes to wear when He needed it.

So, after all of this ranting, what is it that we can do? Get informed, and use our voices to get our political leaders to sit up and take notice. Here are a few sites where you can do this:

www.savedarfur.org
www.darfurgenocide.org
www.africanaction.org
www.darfurfast.org
www.beawitness.org