With a bloody smile

Want to see a nifty trick? I am going to write a word, and you, the reader, will sigh and begin speed-reading through the rest of this column: Sudan. For those of you who don't like current events -- who the hell cares -- it doesn't concern you -- read on about another IU basketball defeat or a campus lecture on a noted ethnomusicologist who will speak Thursday.\nSudan is a haunting word, chilling in its power to reach out from the darkness with bloody fingers. It causes us to retreat toward false illusions, pretense, ignorance and poisonous indifference. Apathy is seductive because it makes humanity inhuman. Nobel laureate and Auschwitz survivor Elie Wiesel writes, "Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end. Not to respond to the plight of the suffering, not to relieve their solitude by offering them a spark of hope is to exile them from human memory. And in denying their humanity we betray our own."\nBill Clinton said his greatest regret while president was doing nothing while 800,000 Africans were murdered in Rwanda as America watched on television. Who then cared about Rwanda? You can't stop ethnic warfare. It's a small, nothing country, and they've been killing themselves forever, right? More than a million Armenians were quietly killed in 1915. Now, 80 years later, we must bear witness to another forgotten genocide. \nAt the end of this summer 30,000 to 40,000 Sudanese were murdered while 1.8 million more were driven from their homes. In its report titled, "Sudan: No one to complain to, no respite for the victims, impunity for the perpetrators," Amnesty International quoted the testimony of a man in Darfur who said that soldiers had tortured his brother to death, while other reports cite decapitated children, systematic rapes and the destruction of entire villages. \nWhere is the outrage? Where are the voices clamoring for justice? Why aren't the Black Student Union, the Muslim Student Union and Campus Crusade for Christ organizing marches with the campus cultural centers? Why isn't Adam Herbert sending us another campus-wide e-mail, except this time, urging us to action? Why isn't Hillel organizing vigils with luminous banners invoking visions of the Holocaust reading "Never again?" Why isn't there a delegation of hundreds of IU students at the Statehouse urging our representatives to do something, anything? The answer is simple: It isn't a priority, and we just don't care.\nIn the 2004 election, we learned about the focus of "morality" in America. Excrement. What we learned was that America didn't care whether or not Iraq was a threat. What was clear was that gays, secular liberals and those attempting to gain national health insurance definitely were. We also learned that while Sudan bled, the Bushes got a new puppy and housebroke him. (Finally, a newspaper gets some use at the White House.)\nWith all of the biblical rhetoric and the blaming of gays, lesbians, abortionists and American Civil Liberties Union members for the 9-11 attacks by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, leaders of the Christian right, not a whisper has been uttered about Sudanese families being raped and murdered. \nIn Iraq we find doubt and emptiness when the administration told us there was cause and crime. Charles Bukowski once wrote that, "sometimes you've got to kill 4 or 5/ thousand men before you somehow/ get to believe that the sparrow/ is immortal, money is piss and/ that you have been wasting/ your time."\nI, you, we, will remember, 10 years from now in a teary PBS documentary that while Sudan turned into a widening gyre of death, the world remained silent and enjoyed its dance of apathy. And as Czech author Milan Kundera wrote of East European intellectuals complicit in Stalinist crimes, we don't dance a dance of macabre, but innocence -- "Innocence dancing with a bloody smile"