Once upon a time, a man put up a website detailing his platform for his bid for elected office. The office was the Presidency, and that man was Barack Obama. As soon as the candidates announced for primaries, I raced to their websites. And, what to my wondering eyes should appear on one, but the very things at the forefront of my mind in the summer of 2007--genocide, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan.
Somewhere, in the piles of information on healthcare and the economy and war and other big things that matter to most people, this man had enough space for what mattered to me, what matters to so many genocide scholars, and what matters, ubelievably, to so many suffering through mass atrocity. He bravely discussed our failings and the intertwining of American foreign policy and the plight of the targetted around the world. In later incarnations of his website, as the election process droned on, these tidbits disappeared under the weight of issues more relevant to most people, but I knew what he had said and I knew what he stood for, and, among other things, I voted for him twice for this reason.
Well, it's back, and you can read about it over at the Genocide Intervention Network. These are hard tasks to accomplish and require constant vigilance and extraordinary effort. We will continue to fail; that is the reality of human conflict. But when our President is committed to our responsibility to prevent atrocity, only then is that end possible.
Peace isn't acheived through threat, nor safety and security at the point of the sword, but through the cooperative labors of those who seek to build stable communities with the capacity to provide social support, economic viability, and resolve conflict through words and not weapons. Our job is not done until no group, no government imagines that murder, rape, relocation, or deprivation are successful methods for achieving their goals.
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