I bought the movie Hotel Rwanda several months ago, right after it came out on video. I finally got around to watching it today. The movie (for the uninitiated) is about the Hutu genocidal massacre of the Tutsi minority (who were suspected of being complicitious with the Belgians when they controlled the country.
One advantage of older age is that you remember things that younger people only read about in the history books. I remember when the massacre was going on. I heard about people hiding in churches and being killed in there. It was beyond my comprehension then (and I was in my 30's at the time) that something like that could happen in my lifetime.
As I watched this movie, I got madder and madder. At what was happening in the movie, at what was happening in our world, at what was happening in our country/government AND, most of all, at what WASN'T happening in myself. In the movie, a hotel manager saves the lives of 1200 PEOPLE (not rodents, lizards or rabbits, but people). People indiscriminately killing people. From the movie AND what I remember, the U.S. government did NOTHING. We were still smarting from the butt-kicking in Somalia the year before. But I was also mad at myself because this happens every day in every way everywhere and I do almost nothing about it. In the past 50 years, it has happened in Germany, Russia, Cambodia, the U.S., the Middle East, Bosnia, Colombia, and Latin America.
NOW, WAIT A MINUTE, I imagine you saying. It has never happened in our country, the land of the free and the home of the brave. If it did, it was in the past. I knew nothing about it. But in the streets of our cities, people of all races are dying everyday just because of the color of their skin. Mugged, raped, tortured, murdered, etc. All over the US EVERY DAY!
Where does the cycle stop? When can we learn to love each other for our difference instead of hating ourselves for them?
