I purchase some of my work materials from Ten Thousand Villages. They work with Artisanat et Developpement (http://www.tenthousandvillages.com/catalog/artisan.detail.php?artisan_id=5) (not safe for some atheists, and there is no mention on that page of how grave the crisis is) to sell fair-trade handcrafted goods from all over the globe. I thought of them because Arwen mentioned fair trade. It’s not fair-trade certified metal, but it’s a start. TTV might increase their efforts in the DRC if there were an email campaign.

But one of the things I thought of while reading the review was a post by flea over at One Good Thing” some months back. It was in the form of a letter to her young sons for when they grow up, and what it means to be good people and good men.

And then I think of the men I know, and all the men in the US, and how things could begin to change if, whenever a guy makes a rape joke, one or two or all of the other guys don’t laugh, and don’t back down, and say out loud that rape is too awful and the time for stupid rape jokes is way over. And gradually the concept of rape becomes as repellent to everyone as, say, the depravity of a Jeffrey Dahmer.

I wish to hell that I could, overnight, make everyone take it personally. Because the next morning, we’d be living in a different world.

As it is, I know that when Bush talks about “Saddam’s rape camps”, it’s just showmanship. Where are the WMDs? In their pants.

Sorry. I’m veering out of control. How can we get everyone in the world to think “OMG, what if that happened to me?” and be profoundly horrified? What if the UN peacekeeping troops were so appalled that they helped people instead of getting in line?

A start is by not laughing, not staying uncomfortably silent, when someone - man or woman - makes a joke, or diminishes anyone’s humanity in the way it’s been done for so long.

Now I will go lie down. Just for a little while. Because now is when I remember that until rapists have good reason to doubt whether they’ll survive their little adventure, we’ve got no leverage. Maybe the first thing we pack in humanitarian aid packages should be a weapon for every civilian woman.

See? Going away now.

I read your post on the DRC and didn’t comment about it. I’ve been to the DRC. Have friends who have been there. Have studied the DRC religiously. And all of that started with…hearing about it. “King Leopold’s Ghost” hooked me, and I have never let go. The most difficult thing about The Revolution is that, although it certainly won’t happen in the way that we want, it does happen in little tiny ways. I went to Kenya/Uganda/Rwanda/DRC because I was educated about some of the stuff going on there. And while I was there I was able to learn so much more, and do some good. Simple as that. While it *is* hard to stay engaged with something from so far away, not trying at all really doesn’t help. And like I said, blogging is an art. The hard stuff is hard for a reason, but it is going to change lives in a more profound way.

Of course, when we have the attitude that we should “change what we can”, we immediately limit ourselves to focusing on small things that have a higher chance of success.

My wife and I pour a huge amount of time into a chinchilla charity. We run America’s only chinchilla-specific 501(c)3. There’s a satisfaction in doing work that is not only meaningful, but produces tangible results. I can change the world for a lot of furry little creatures. How can I stop rape in the Congo, or female genital mutilation, or AIDS as easily?

But the purpose of real charity is not the moral satisfaction of feeling useful — it’s to create lasting change. It’s just hard in the face of such massive problems as these.

This may inspire a post eventually; in any event, I appreciate the challenge to think again.

I have recently started writing with Amnesty again, and I made note of this movie to share, plus am putting this forward as a focus for action. I understand some of the concerns with Amnesty above - and found Naomi Klein’s perception of AI interesting - and that’s a whole other discussion worth having. But I have had amazing connection experiences arising from Amnesty. So, for what my belief is worth, I believe you have made a difference.

I don’t feel like the “I’ll just never use a computer again” is helpful, even if it weren’t just sort of defensive “take my ball and go home”. (Although a boycott to that area? Fair trade certified metal? might be effective.) But I also don’t think the problem is the computer specifically — it’s the demand that it be cheap, that we have a particular form of valuing in economy, the fact that we are often atrocious, as a species.

I grew up a hippie kid. And to me, the idea that clothes were made by other kids half a world away with bleeding fingers and no food and no school and twelve hour days was something I regularly cried about. (I was a very sad kid.) Most of my clothes except underwear were used. When I was 12, an aunt took me out to buy cool clothes, and I puddled in the dressing room crying about the workers who’d bled for them. My dad (who’d taught me these painful truths), was befuddled - because for him, sweatshops were abstract. Really why I had used clothes was because we couldn’t afford new.

Afterwards, I wrestled for years with my guilt: I was a teenager. I wanted not to be a pariah anymore.

Having it raw and open and exposed like that gives me a lot of sympathy to the moral struggles of people and their stuff. We do like our stuff, and most of us DON’T want it, really, at the expense of other people. But if you actually try - and I have - to live a totally impact, violence free consumer life? You can’t really do it. Well, maybe if you’re rich. And that is the problem of value.

I think silence is often a good thing: it is the sound of processing. Defensiveness is much louder.

I also think it’s perfectly okay to write from a place of your sobbing reaction to the rape of others. No, people being raped is not about you: but our experience of you as a writer IS about you. And if you hurt - but we can’t get there ourselves because we’re feeling defensive about our stuff - we might feel the hurt on your behalf.

True. And I think one of the things that we* might be getting to the point of realizing is that one of the effects of the New Public Sphere is that we’ve got (again) access to all sorts of “new” information about the world’s problems, we recognize that we’re unavoidably complicit in them and/or that we certainly have some of the resources (time, money, energy, intellect) to try to do something about them, and then we come face-to-face with the fact that we really would rather not. Just like most people throughout history.

*I’m not sure if I mean we, a particular group of people whose blogs I read and who’ve all been sort of part of the same bloggy social group for a while, “we” the blogosphere, we the feminist blogsosphere (or the part of it that’s my own particular solar system), “we” people of a certain age (which i doubt, since you and I are not the same age), or the generic rhetorical “we.”

I think that raising awareness is absolutely key to beginning to deal with these kinds of huge problems because part of the reason they’re allowed to go on and why people have the sorts of reactions to them you described is because they are invisible, taken for granted. This is obviously not the kind of problem you see results on just like that or the kind of problem that you are going to feel you’ve personally had any kind of impact on because it’s not personal for you; you are and will remain removed from it, so you can’t look for personal gratification like that. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing what you can to raise awareness. Ignorance is the factor here that keeps people comfortable as they benefit from tragedies like this. The discomfort in the reactions to Clarke’s post clearly illustrates that, I think.

Two nights ago while watching the movie, Iraq in Fragments, which presents basically a fly-on-the-wall view of the daily life of three different groups of Iraqis living under occupation (including, somehow, one of Al Sadr’s Shia militias), my disgust was made fresh at the way so many Americans blithely condemn the Iraqis for the hell they are living through and, somehow, for our own country’s troubles, even now. On the fifth anniversary of the invasion while campaigning in my home state, Senator Clinton said that

“…the Iraqi government has to take responsibility for its own future, that we have given them the precious gift of freedom, and it is up to them to decide whether or not they will use it. But we cannot win their civil war.”

Recognizing this as truly one of the most contemptible things I’d heard in a while I nonetheless understood that of course she was merely doing what politicians at her level do: working to fit herself as favorably as possible into the dominant narrative, certainly never challenging it. An awareness on the part of the American public of even just our very recent history in the Middle East would have made it substantially harder to have started this monstrous war in the first place, and just a rudimentary awareness of what’s actually taken place in Iraq since the invasion and the reality of our part in it would not allow for a supposedly progressive presidential candidate to spew shit like that. But that kind of awareness is never going to come from the Clintons of the world, from the top down. It seeps in at the margins and from the bottom and the kind of blogging done here and at Pandagon and increasingly more blogs are a mechanism for that.

A blog post about The Greatest Silence may not drum up much conversation in the comments because it can’t incite the kind of visceral reaction you had to watching it, but it will point a few people in the direction of the movie and so, on the small grassroots level at which blogs tend to operate, raise awareness that much more. It feels like a small thing because it is in relation to the scope of many of the problems in the world, but it’s better that you do it than not and of even more importance that you practice what you blog, that you live and act in accordance with what you know and what you learn everyday and so make the difference you can on whatever level any individual can reasonably be expected to. Acting in whatever capacity you can is more worthwhile than unhelpfully stewing in angst at the recognition of your privilege anyway.