The Ronpaulogists Have Arrived

As I’m typing this, a group of bright-eyed and energetic students are handing out pamphlets for Ron Paul from a basecamp of placards they’ve set up in front of our student union building. Like all true believers, they’re accosting everyone who walks past and grilling them about their preferred candidate, blissfully unaware that most people are not likely to change their political philosophy because of some random stranger in a sandwich board. I know I dedicate far too much time and energy to my distaste for Paul, but it justs floors me every time I think about just how sanctimonious his supporters are in relation to how insane and irrelevent the actual man is.

I don’t really enjoy being a pretentious asshole (other than in my writing), but I can’t shake my desire to innocently ask them about Paul’s 2004 Congressional statement about the 1964 Civil Rights Act being a terrible detriment to race relations or his assertion that gun-grabbing UN shadow officials are conniving to create a North American Union. I’m sure the people are mostly still starry-eyed at the prospect of an anti-war Republican, so maybe I can help open their eyes a little.

Why Won’t They Taaaalk to Me?

I’ve been trying for the past week to get in touch with the Kucinich and Gravel campaigns to submit a brief electronic interview about their views on political power, but they’re not responding. Who’d have thought that presidential candidates would turn down an opportunity to talk to a tiny college newspaper?

This Ethnic Cleansing Brought to You by Gap

Nothing makes me happier than seeing a humanitarian cause become popular; even the most empty-headed consumerist teen will commit great acts of altruism if the issue has enough celebrity endorsements. In the past couple of years, the issue that has epitomized this phenomenon is the ongoing slaughter in the Darfur region of Sudan; thanks in great part to decent media attention and celebrity campaigning, ending the genocide in Darfur has become a hot button issue for people who couldn’t even find Sudan on a map.

 

However, this kind of situation really underlines how fickle humanitarian feelings can be in this country. Just like with fads in music and fashion, many average folks tend to just pick up one or two causes of interest and cast them aside as soon as they become boring or uncool. For most humanitarian crises, interest rarely moves on beyond brief cyclic periods of de-apathization; for example, the brutal regime of Myanmar was all over the news and on the lips of many political figures for a couple of weeks last month, but now it’s nowhere to be found, although they’ll probably pretend to care about it again a year from now to see if any big names bite on it and make it trendy. Belarus and Nigeria are other good examples of this; coverage of their constant humanitarian crises tends to pop up twice a year or so. Presumably, the principal reason people continue to care about Darfur is the fact that Bono made some passionate pleas about it between his frantic bouts of being musically irrelevant.

 

Moreover, in the blitz of activism regarding the situation over in Sudan, people have begun endorsing asinine positions that are almost unassailable due to the risk of sounding apathetic about genocide. The most foolish position to me is the demand that the US intervene militarily to stop the violence in Darfur; this is a grossly irresponsible suggestion, but continues to gain traction among my fellow liberals. I thought that the mess in Iraq was enough to teach us that military invasions for humanitarian reasons are terribly risky and tend to create more problems than they solve; how one can oppose the Iraq War and defend a pre-emptive strike against Sudan is beyond me. Furthermore, the violence in Sudan is the result of centuries-old ethnic and religious disputes that an American invasion force would be just as effective in stopping as it’s been able to facilitate workable religious compromise in Iraq.

 

An important thing to remember about the Darfur genocide is that it’s not genocide of the Holocaust model, where one conquerable group slaughtered masses of unarmed minorities; bloodthirsty militias represent every ethnic group in the region. Unless we disarmed everyone on all sides of the conflict (an impossible feat), we’d just replace one slaughter with another.

 

So keep up those donation drives and protests, Darfur crusaders, but don’t be so quick to support actions that would only exacerbate the situation; peace can’t always be achieved through the barrel of a gun. And more importantly, keep an eye on all those other conflicts and oppressors in the world; they deserve your attention too, even if Bono doesn’t have anything to say about them this week.