The Passion of the Present

The fact that millions of people have been moved to buy tickets and witness “The Passion of the Christ” is especially poignant in the shadow of an immediate tragedy facing our collective human soul: The Passion of the Present, now, in Sudan.

In Darfur, a region in southern Sudan approximately the size of Texas, over a million people are threatened with torture and death at the hands of marauding militia and a complicit government. Imagine a militia that forces parents to choose whether their children will be burned alive or shot to death. Imagine that in the very same month the world remembers the genocides of Cambodia and Rwanda, the unfolding news of another in Sudan is barely heard and largely ignored.

Genocide evokes not only the moral, but also, the legal responsibility of the world community. Under international agreement, a nation must intervene to stop a genocide when it is officially acknowledged. "Officially" is the key word here. Though President Bush has publicly protested the "atrocities" in Darfur and U.N. Secretary Kofi Annan has urged the international community to act, no nation has officially acknowledged the truth: Sudan has become a bleeding ground of genocide. And in the void of our collective silence, the Sudanese government continues to act with brutal impunity.

The Passion of the Present