The other activist cause

Before this past Sunday, I had never been to a political rally in New York, so my expectations of what one should look like were largely shaped by TV news coverage of the Republican National Convention. I knew, of course, that the demonstration I was attending to protest genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan would not draw the throngs who gathered in opposition to the reelection of President Bush. But still, I anticipated that if hundreds of thousands would come out to protest President Bush's war in Iraq, surely a paltry few thousand would show up to protest President Omar Bashir's systematic extermination of Sudanese blacks.

I was sorely disappointed.

Participants at the rally against genocide in Darfur did not number in the thousands, but in the hundreds. You couldn't have filled McCosh 50 with the people who assembled outside the UN headquarters to plead with Kofi Annan to save lives while there are still lives to be saved. With a heavy heart, I realized that we live in an age in which ECO 101 lectures draw larger crowds than public demonstrations against ethnic cleansing.

This is not the same as saying that we live in a politically inactive age. We know that there is a large and vocal body of activists out there who are ready and eager to publicly decry the killing of innocent men, women, and children. We know that there are legions of Americans out there who earnestly profess to be ardent defenders of the voiceless victims of aggression. We know that activists making these claims exist because they were out in full force throughout the Republican convention.

Pundits interested in the dynamics of the liberal activist community have focused on explaining why so many Americans are so bitterly aligned against our current president.

But I am puzzled by a different question. I want to know why so many of the activists who display a passionate concern for the consequences of Bush's policies do not express a similar concern over genocide in the Sudan.

I have trouble fathoming the thought process of an activist who self-identifies as a defender of human rights, expresses that identity by protesting at the Republican national convention, and is at the same time willing to abandon the people of Darfur to their miserable fate. Yet there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who have done everything in their power to highlight the errors of our president and who have done absolutely nothing to call attention to the daily massacres perpetrated by Khartoum's death squads.

How do we explain this behavior? We can begin by noting that the behavior of activist groups cannot really be assessed from a purely "logical" standpoint. Nobody expects activists to be robotic analysts who impartially examine all the flashpoints in the world and then rationally decide which humanitarian crises most merit their attention. It is not as though activists consciously choose not to care about genocide in the Sudan. It's fair to assume that many activists do not even know what is happening in Darfur, and many more probably have no idea that anybody is rallying about it.

Protests are social and cultural events just as much as they are intellectual activities. People come to rallies not just to speak their minds but to meet people of like mind and to have a good time. Being anti-Bush is good social fun. In certain cultural contexts, cataloguing George W.'s foibles is a primary — and inexhaustible — source of group entertainment. There is even a profitable consumer market — witness "Fahrenheit 9/11" — dedicated to indulging people who enjoy laughing at the president. There is a much smaller consumer market for people who enjoy laughing at genocide.

I do not mean to suggest that anti-Bush activists do not take themselves or their cause seriously. And there is nothing inherently objectionable in the fact that some serious anti-Bush activists do link their social and cultural (even consumer) identity to their core political beliefs. The problem occurs when the anti-Bush identity gets to be so total and consuming that the activist becomes blind to any new developments in the world. People whose very social identity depends on the idea that Bush poses the greatest threat to world order have prematurely foreclosed on the possibility that someone else may be just as bad or worse.

The unwillingness of anti-Bush activists to acknowledge the crimes of villains who are not named George is costing lives in Darfur. But there is still time — very limited time — for liberal activists to remove their blinders, bear witness to the horrors of the Sudanese genocide, and live up to noblest part of their creed.