This was an email that was forwarded to me from the Genocide Intervention Network [wiki]. The organization is American oriented, however, they have a very global platform and have been very sucessful lobbying in Washington for populations affected in unstable regions. I like their focus, and I hope that more advocacy groups like this begin root in other places around the world. I thought I’d share the email with anyone who might be interested. For people who aren’t hanging out in Montreal (not that it’s not fun here) I hope you have a great summer!

April is a month where we bear testimony to some of the most gruesome atrocities of the twentieth century. Ironically, the century that brought us the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights also witnessed the Holocaust and genocides in Armenia, Cambodia and Rwanda.

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For anyone here in Montreal, this event held on the global day for Darfur looks to be very promising and informative. Hope you can make it!

More info

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

- Kurt Vonnegut

Oh my god… one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century… Kurt Vonnegut is dead! Heart pain. :(

I don’t know what to say. On personal level I am sorry I never had the chance to write to him to tell him that somewhere in the world another person was absolutely inspired by his work. There are only a few writers who I can say have transformed my being and helped defined my views about life and the world. He was one of them. I am just glad, grateful that he lived in at time where his visions, his writings, his art, his satire was needed the most. He’s not gone forever, his legacy, his flame… he will always be here.

By far the most dangerous foe we have to fight is apathy – indifference from whatever cause, not from a lack of knowledge, but from carelessness, from absorption in other pursuits, from a contempt bred of self satisfaction.

- William Osler (Father of Modern Medicine)

http://www.filmloop.com/cgi-bin/bv/bv.py?ticket=jpH7ym5Xwgey458JA08v7io-g-HfdDx0&flash=1&extAds=1&px=FL

I found this link on the imdb site for “Sometimes in April“… a movie that after a year and a half I still can’t stop thinking about.

Today is April 6th, 2007. Here I am, sitting somewhat comfortably in my chair on a pinpoint in the North American continet. Among the concerns I have are the upcoming exams and my plans for the summer. It’s difficult to imagine that nineteen years ago I could have, all of us could have just as easily been born somewhere else, where the destruction of our lives, families, homes, everything we knew was all reduced to a red spot on a map, a small yellow headline — flickering for a few moments on a television screen to the rest of the world.

In 1994, in a short stretch of 100 days, beginning on April 6th and continuing to mid-July, between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Rwandans were killed. The link shows a stretch of picture taken at Rwanda January this year. Like the calm after the storm, these pictures show such a serene place that it is almost impossible to imagine that these luscious green fields are where only 13 years ago the blood of thousands of human beings was shed while everyone either stood by or did not care.

Sometimes I just wonder whether the most horrifying thought is the apathy, the massive failure of humanity– 13 years ago, when I’m certain if everyone, citizens, the international community had cared, had pushed hard enough, at the very least a million lives would not have been lost… or that 13 years from now, we’ll sigh, looking back at today and the things that plague our world, and wish we had cared about something, wish we had done something, anything… when it was not too late.