GENOCIDE IN DARFUR: Notes from the DC Rally, "So, Like, Be Peaceful"

by Mik Awake

On Tuesday, April 25th of this year, I sent out an e-mail to sixty people in my address book. I reprint the email here in its entirety:

I know it's short notice, but there’s a very important rally for Sudan in D.C. this Sunday. I urge you to attend if you can. Like you, I am skeptical of the effectiveness of rallies in this age of preemptive warfare, impotent media outlets and rampant apathy. At times like our own, a rally seems more like a relic than a useful agent for social change. But to paraphrase Samuel Beckett who would have turned 100 two weeks ago: We must go on. We can't go on. We'll go on.

Though I was certain that my admixture of sincerity, sanctimony and self-awareness, not to mention the gratuitous Beckett quote, would draw a flood of responses, only one person replied to say that he was planning to go.

So at 5 o’clock on the following Sunday morning, I met my friend – we’ll call him C – in Chinatown to take the earliest bus out of New York. It was clear that neither of us had slept the night before. We boarded the bus and proceeded to sleep through the 5-hour ride. When we woke up in DC, we were inexplicably more tired than before.

It was midday, and the sun was bearing down hard, doubling its intensity as it rebounded off the buildings. When we arrived at the National Mall, we saw that it was barely half full. The Capitol building loomed behind the stage, and a singer was going through an inspirational song. We are the world. We are the children.

The motley lineup included a country music band, Dick Gregory (who vowed to go on another fast), several rabbis, author Samantha Power, Senator Barack Obama, and, yes, Manute Bol. Their voices echoed ominously across the Mall, and the organizers were wise to save actor George Clooney for the end, assuming correctly that half the people (i.e. all the women) were there to see him.

C and I sat in the back, near the center path. In front of us were three officers on horseback, chatting with passersby, who continually petted the twitching beasts. Near us on the lawn, a youngish couple and their toddler sat on a blanket, pulling food out of a Whole Foods bag. The toddler wore a tiny “Save Darfur” t-shirt. A few yards off, a father and son tossed a tennis ball. It was, in many ways, another Sunday afternoon at the park.

C and I decided to perambulate the Mall. As we did, a group of suburban teens from a synagogue in Philadelphia passed in front of us. They were grinning, darting glances amongst themselves, clapping, and chanting the following words:

Hey hey!
Ho ho!
Genocide has got to go!

C and I exchanged glances, shook our heads.

The farther we advanced into the crowd, the more we realized that a majority of the people in attendance were synagogue youth groups. Their presence gave the event the feel of a different kind of rally – a pep rally.

They wore the green “Save Darfur” tee shirts. They held posters announcing the name of their synagogue or temple, and they carried thousands of placards with the words, scrawled in buoyant magic-marker: “Never Again.”  Scanning the crowd the gentle irony was not lost on us: the words “Never Again” were repeated again and again and again.

Considering what I thought to be the gravity and magnitude of the situation, the turnout was abysmal. (Being of Ethiopian descent, I was particularly upset by the absence of an Ethiopian contingent. The largest African community in the D.C.-area – and neighbor of Sudan – had not even sent a small church group. But who could blame the Ethiopians for their lack of interest? (The rally was scheduled the day after a large Ethiopian music concert in D.C., and they might have thought it disrespectful to stumble to such an event hungover and hoarse.)

The April 2006 Rally to Stop Genocide was, in many ways, a failure: the low turnout, the surplus of cant, the dearth of realistic solutions, the careless use of the word “genocide,” and the blind moral fervor. I regretted the optimism of my e-mail from a few days before. Nothing was resolved. The most coherent speakers were the briefest: in Darfur, we need to do X, Y, and Z. Good night. There were only a few speakers who spoke with that longed-for combination of urgency and rationality.

With the empty feeling that accompanies anticlimactic events, C and I made our weary way back towards the bus. What were we expecting? A cataclysmic turnout? A rage bordering on the revolutionary? Armed resistance?

We went to the Darfur rally; we did our part, and now it was over. And somewhere in Africa, women were being raped, the janjaweed were decimating villages and yes, yes, yes. We know, we know, we know. Never again, never again.

But for my friend C and I, little did we know that a real crisis was yet to come.

When we arrived at the empty parking lot where the Chinatown bus had dropped us off earlier that day, there was already a large group of people waiting. Five minutes passed; no bus. More people were crowding the sidewalks and leaning on parked cars. Most of them had just come from the rally; most of them were college-aged. Thirty minutes passed; no bus. C and I both sensed a bad situation brewing. Nervous glances were cast about, and they all had the same meaning behind them: We’re not all going to fit on this bus. After an hour, the bus finally pulled into the lot, and that’s when all hell broke loose.

Like so many African refugees desperate to flee a war-torn country, all the people who, only hours ago, had been at the Darfur rally steamrolled each other to be first in line at the front of the bus.

“Move back!” shouted the driver. “Let them off! Move back!”

That’s when we realized that there were people on the bus trying to get off. We realized this, but still we didn’t budge. No one wanted to lose position. The new arrivals stepped off the bus with incredulous smirks, trickling out between us.

It was an absurd scene: an empty parking lot, a lone bus, and a horde of people with “Save Darfur” shirts and posters jostling each other in a suffocating semicircle. Neither C nor I could lift our arms. C and I exchanged glances, shook our heads. It was all we could do.

As the last passengers got off the bus, and just as we were about to force our way on, the driver reemerged and yelled, “Internet tickets first!” At which point, several people in our midst – a minority – excitedly raised their hands, and in them were limp, severely creased computer printouts. The driver let them on; they squeezed past C and I and dozens of others who had purchased tickets at the station in New York.

The bus was filling up quickly with the online buyers. Our patience was wearing thin.

“We paid our fucking money like everybody else!” my friend C shouted at the driver, clutching his unused return ticket. “We want to fucking go home!”

“Hey,” said the driver. “Fuck you!”

Meanwhile, a young lady of college age stood beside the driver. She had on a “Save Darfur” t-shirt and matching headband around her golden locks. She had obviously purchased her tickets online and was busy pointing out to the driver several other friends of hers who were still stuck in the crowd, also online ticket buyers. Their group continued to trickle onboard, and the young lady, their unofficial leader, had the satisfied, playful energy of someone organizing a softball game. She giggled with her friends. It was as though she had made it onto the last helicopter leaving Saigon, and we, the unlucky Vietnamese, were being left behind to fend for ourselves.

Only moments after the tense verbal altercation between my friend C and the bus driver, the young lady turned her attention to us. Fresh off the rally and perhaps ennobled by her own sense of moral uprightness, she addressed us – and my friend C in particular – with the following question:

“Hey, weren’t you guys just at the Darfur rally?”

None of us, least of all C, knew how to respond to this. I sensed that she had more to say, that this was a roundabout introduction to what she really wanted to tell us, a rhetorical question. My sense was, unfortunately, correct:

“So, like,” she said, nodding. “Be peaceful.”

The anger and disgust that this comment solicited from those of us who were doomed to find alternate means of leaving the city almost immediately compounded my sense of disappointment held over from the rally. This seemed a logical extension of the event. A humanitarian disaster that has claimed the lives of 400,000 human beings – and counting – is perhaps a very difficult, abstract notion for us to wrap our minds around. We have classes and work on Monday; we have buses to catch. So instead of working together towards solutions, we resort, as the young lady did, to abstractions, manipulating the distant reality of the situation to fit our own moral, political, and personal needs. My friend C and I, dejected and tired, made our way to the Greyhound station.

In the end, we made it back to the city that night. But we vowed never to attend another stupid rally again, and never again to think that our generation is somehow an improvement on the previous, and never again to heed the advice of those who, from their seats of comfort and peace, think that “being peaceful” is the answer to calamitous situations like clambering for a seat on an overbooked bus, or like the greatest humanitarian crisis of this century. And of course we vowed never to take the Chinatown bus anywhere again.

Never again, indeed.

(Rally foto from flickr.)