Dear God, Never Again

I just watched Hotel Rwanda this evening.

I didn't cry much until an hour after the credits had rolled across my television screen and then the tears slipped down my face unheeded as I realized how much I have just to be free from that kind of fear, and how little I truly know about my world.

There have been horrors before, and there will be horrors after, but I had no idea that in my lifetime nearly 1 million people could be slaughtered in the space of 100 days without so much as a tsk-tsk from the global community. Some of the most devastating footage was in the special features of the DVD, in which the real-life Paul Rusesabagina returns to the Hotel in which he saved the lives of 1200 refugees, and when he visits the memorial of a mass-grave of 45,000 people, from an attack that only 4 survived. Officials found bodies, preserved by lye. These bodies—real, not plaster—are on display on tables for visitors to the memorial to see. The machete gashes in their skulls and crushed bones of their limbs a silent testimony to the atrocities that were done to them.

I am still sick, just thinking about it.