Tonight I was part of something truly and profoundly remarkable. While I engaged in this same activity roughly a year ago, it took my second trip through this experience to come to the realization I would like to share with you now.
Tonight I joined 150 of my fellow University of Texas students in the tedious, unglamorous and occasionally painful experience of preparing ten thousand white roses to be distributed tomorrow across the University campus. On face value there is a certain level of incredibility to this evening. 150 students coming together on Wednesday night in a town and a campus with near infinite choices of how to spend one’s night ranging from a studious night in the library to a wild night downtown to prepare roses for of all things: Holocaust remembrance.
While I might shrug this unbelievable event and chalk this success up to the advertised free t-shirt, free pizza and for those who desired: volunteer credit, this I believe would not do this phenomenon justice. Tonight, these peers of mine decided to spend an hour, two hours or for many the entire four hours to preparing roses. Many of these individuals have excitedly committed either before or after this evening that they will join many others to assist in passing out these prepared roses to go above and beyond their free t-shirt, free pizza or their required volunteer credit.
Why? Why have my closest friends at this school organize people I have known for years and people I have never met and may never really get to know decide to spend anywhere from one hour to twelve hours to months on a relatively thankless, tedious, unglamorous and occasionally painful experience in preparing roses for an oft depressing topic of genocide?
My answer: hope.
I am a leader of the White Rose Society, the group who has spent months planning tonight’s event, and last year’s event and the two years before that. We are an ever growing yet continually small group of students dedicated to eradicating genocide by working on promoting awareness, advocacy and aide on and around our campus. We work tireless with varying levels of success alongside tens of thousands activist around the world who are directly, indirectly and in most cases not at all affected by the crime they work to end.
Again I wonder why? Why do I, my friends and all these other people, many of which have no direct connection to the horrors of genocide decide to lose sleep, forget to eat and face challenges continue to fight strongly against genocide? Why do we activist continue to fight on even though the current genocide in Darfur rages onto it’s sixth with minimal progress made and prospects for Darfur as grim as ever?
My answer, again, is hope… and a certain degree of stubborn tenacity that endears me all the more to the activist mentality.
We tend to get wrapped up in the numbers. 6,000,000 Jews perished in the Holocaust among 3,000,000 other victims. Anywhere between 200,000 and 450,000 Darfuris have been murdered in the last five years. UNAMID is supposed to have 26,000 troops, but only has 9,000. We have pulled out 500,000,000 dollars from Texas pension fund money that used to fund the genocide. We have 200 members, we have 1,000 petition signatures, we have raises 200 dollars this week.
When we want we chose to focus elsewhere, we ask about politics. Did you hear what Barack Obama said? How about Hillary Clinton? Did your representative vote for the Sudan Accountability Divestment Act? Is the UT System ever going to divest? Will President Bush stick to his promises? Can we do more to pressure China?
Sometimes we decided to point the finger. The United States should do more. China is evading the issue. Omar Al-Bashir is playing his games. The rebel groups are bad guys too. The United Nations is ineffective. The African Union is too new and too inexperienced.
We can and many times we should use numbers to help understand the situation and to gauge progress. We can and many times we should discuss politics in order to search for solution and bring these solutions to fruition. We can and many times we should look to where the breakdown is and who is responsible for delaying progress.
What we lose in this process is the two simple and stark realities. The first: people are dying. The second: an unprecedented amount of people have chosen to care and do something about it. Numbers matter, politics matter and people are to blame. We have divested, recruited and counted the dead. We have politicked and lobbied. We have as academically, as journalist and as activist pointed the finger and have discussed in both overly simple and overly complex terms: who is the “bad-guy” we should all blame.
These are all significant and much needed elements of advocacy and discourse, but we need time to time remember about the people: the people who have died; the people who may die and the people who have thought to stop crimes against humanity. People like the original White Rose who for their efforts to speak out against Nazi crimes, were beheaded. And for their efforts our contemporary anti-genocide group has chosen to become living memorials of these brave activists.
The ten thousand roses are about those have died and those who may died, but also about those who live to commemorate: those who live to continue the fight against inhumanity; those who refuse to give up hope!
In the span of a day, my peers: friends, acquaintances and strangers alike contribute our time and our energy in remember that in a similar amount of time, ten thousand people could be murdered because of a racist ideology combined with a horrendous bureaucracy deemed them to be subhuman all because of a group these individuals may have chosen or not chosen to be part. We do this because we want to remember and we want others to remember. That is our task in name that is how we have chosen to describe such a task.
What we do not say is that this task is not solely about history or the now cliché sentiment of “never again,” but that this task is our attempt to proudly display our hope that one day we will pass out roses to remember and remember alone. That one day genocide will be a thing of the past and the past alone. That we will not have to promote a week of education and action with these roses, but that we will only commemorate those victims of an earlier era.
Until then we pass out our roses for hope.
