Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez has spent his last year (and change) focusing on homelessness, specifically telling the story of Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, a former cello student at the prestigious Julliard in New York City, who as a result of the ravages of schizophrenia and a social services system that has found it more convenient to ignore him (and thousands like him in the United States) has been homeless in downtown Los Angeles for years. With the help of Lopez and dozens of others throughout Los Angeles (homeless services providers, family and friends and also caring readers), Nathaniel has moved into an apartment (at least part of the time) and is using the resources available to homeless people on Skid Row. Nathaniel's story has it seems prompted the Times and Lopez to turn a glaring spotlight on Skid Row, perhaps one of the great shames of our increasingly divided America. In the shadow of great wealth, the nation's largest concentration of homeless (and unfortunately associated criminal activity, public health problems and ignored tragedies) festers in the middle of our revitalizing downtown.
Today Steve Lopez brought the story of Lee Sevilla to the attention of hopefully millions of people. Sevilla is a 71-year-old woman with a part-time receptionist job who lives in her Dodge Neon, maintains her hygiene at a Chevron station and has a daughter who wants to help her. But Sevilla doesn't want to be a drain or imposition on anyone and like all of us seems to want to maintain the dignity of her independence and self-sufficiency. I cannot recommend strongly enough reading this.
No one else, sadly, is really writing these stories or covering them, which is another national shame in this country--this time on the newspapers and other media. But thanks to people like Steve Lopez, things are improving in Los Angeles for the homeless. Now if the other cities in the county can find the courage to do what's right (helping people) rather that simply what is easy (pandering to neighborhood "leaders" who spread unscientific half-truths about the not-real negative effects of locating a homeless services agency in their communities). And thanks to people like Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, one of the rebel groups in Darfur signed an agreement to end the violence. Unfortunately for the world, the New York Times makes his columns available only to paying members of its Web site.
So to remedy that today I present ...
May 7, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Heroes of Darfur
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
For three grueling years, Eric Reeves has been fighting for his life, struggling in a battle with leukemia that he may eventually lose. And in his spare time, sometimes from his hospital bed, he has emerged as an improbable leader of a citizens' army fighting to save hundreds of thousands of other lives in Darfur.
Pressure from that citizen army helped achieve a breakthrough on Friday: a tentative peace deal between the Sudanese government and the biggest Darfur rebel faction, brokered in part by U.S. officials. We should be skeptical that this agreement will really end the bloodshed — past cease-fires and promises have not been honored — but also rejoice in a glimpse of sun over the most wretched place in the world today.
If the violence does diminish — and that will take hard work in the months and years ahead — part of the credit will go to Mr. Reeves, a scholar of English literature at Smith College who has used an arsenal of e-mail messages, phone calls and Web pages to battle the Sudanese government and American indifference. He was the first person I know to describe the horrors of Darfur as genocide, and he financed his quixotic campaign by taking out a loan on his house.
Perhaps the most striking distinction in the history of genocide is not between those who murder and those who don't, but between "bystanders" who avert their eyes and "upstanders" who speak out. Professor Reeves has been a full-time upstander on Sudan since 1999, back when the people being slaughtered there were Christians in the south of the country. He noticed immediately in 2003 that Sudan had diversified into butchering Muslims in Darfur, and his frantic blowing of the whistle helped alert me and others. Visit his Web site, sudanreeves.org, but be careful — his fury may set your computer smoking.
I don't agree with every bit of Mr. Reeves's analysis, and sometimes I flinch at his stridency. But there's no better excuse for stridency than genocide.
While Darfur has been incredibly depressing, the grass-roots movement in this country to stop the genocide is immensely inspiring. (To join, go to Web sites like www.savedarfur.org or www.genocideintervention.net.) The activist kids just bowl me over: girls like Rachel Koretsky, a 13-year-old who organized a rally in Philadelphia, distributed circulars and conducted a raffle to raise money for Darfur as her bat mitzvah charity project. So far, Rachel has raised $14,000 for Darfur.
Or kids like Tacey Smith, a 12-year-old in the farm town of Gaston, Ore. After seeing the movie "Hotel Rwanda," she formed a Sudan Club with a few friends and has raised $400 for Darfur by selling eggs, washing cars and asking for donations instead of birthday presents. Her best friend's Christmas present to her was raising $50 for Darfur. Now Tacey is organizing a Darfur fair next month.
President Bush has been more active lately on Darfur, and without the administration's relentless pushing the peace deal on Friday would have been impossible. But by and large, there has been a vacuum of leadership on Darfur over the last few years, and ordinary Americans — particularly young people — have tried to fill it. I don't know whether to be sad or inspired that we can turn for moral guidance to 12-year-olds.
Then there are the entertainers. Frankly, I think it's bizarre that we turn to movie stars for guidance on international relations. But in this case, I bow low to George Clooney, who had the guts to travel to the Darfur area last month, and to Angelina Jolie, who has visited the Darfur area twice and is pushing for action on Darfur more forcefully than almost anyone in Washington.
It gets weirder: "CBS Evening News" decided that genocide wasn't newsworthy, devoting only two minutes to coverage of Darfur in all of 2005 — but there's excellent coverage on MTV's university network and in episodes of the TV show "E.R." set in Darfur. And one of the best presentations of life in Darfur is in an extraordinary video game developed with help from MTV and available free at www.darfurisdying.com. In the game, you're a Darfuri, trying to survive as Sudan's janjaweed militias hunt you down.
So that's how the response is unfolding to the first genocide of the 21st century: a video game is one of the best guides to understanding the slaughter, and our moral vacuum is filled by teenyboppers and movie stars.
Someday we will look back at this motley army of children and celebrities, presided over by a man struggling with leukemia, and thank them for salvaging our national honor.
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