(NOTE: this blog entry was all happy and what not, but I got on a roll... if you're a child living at home, please have a parent read this entry before you do.)
Like now.
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It's snowing again, which is absolutely lovely. As long as it has to be winter, it needs to be very much wintery. Last week's snow was melted off enough for the world to begin to look sadly desolate and mud-bathed, like a baby bird that's fallen out of it's nest. I don't care how much you may like birds, chicks are just butt ugly, and once they're muddy they're beyond being even slightly compelling or touchable. Ew. BUT, we're about to get our gorgeous white coat on again, and hopefully it'll stick around until some of our beautiful spring feathers have grown...
Seems there's a blogging trend that's been started. I'd think that I was just jumping on the bandwagon, but since I have Joannarenae.blogspot.com and three live.spaces.com's that have been retired, I can convince myself that, even though I've only recently picked it up again, it is a habit that has been ingrained in my conscience being since I was about 14.
Made chocolate chip cookies last night so Q could munch while he studied... ended up that we munched while we finished a movie that we had cut off for the sake of studying several nights ago. The cookies were to die for. I have a reputation for my choco chip cookies, and I could just give away my two little secrets that make all the difference in the world, but I think I'll hang onto them... just 'cause I can. ;)
The movie itself was very interesting. It was a 2003 Angelina Jolie movie that was dedicated to the humanitarian rescue workers that have been working independently of the UN and other major corporations for the last 30+ years. We don't have a language guardian, so we ended up muting Clive Owen's character throughout the majority of the film, as he had an excessively filthy mouth, but we still managed to enjoy it. It was achingly intense, full of starving children and mothers getting murdered and so on, but it did a fantastic job portraying some of the devastating and desperate situations that people live in. It didn't have a bunch of the typical anti-military hate stuff that humanitarians tend to use (watch Avatar, you'll know what I mean) but the bare, raw facts were there.
Actually, I take that back. As awful as the movie was, (it spanned Ethiopia in the 80's and Cambodia and Chechnya in the 90's) they couldn't come close to portraying the real horror. Sunday morning we heard a missionary from Cambodia who had survived the labor camps in the early 90's where he had been held from the age of 7 to the age of 11, had been taken to the US and eventually adopted into a home in Wisconsin. Several years later, at the age of 16, he returned to the country to help with the mission work there. His stories were graphic on a stomach turning level. Literally. I left the service ready to puke and having a hard time standing up straight. At 7 he was placed in a camp with 1,000 children. They were beaten, starved, beheaded, forced to beat each other to death, forced to fight for the soldier's entertainment, and day after day driven by the truckload to work the rice patties. They felt the blood of their friends splattering their faces and arms as the soldiers laughingly attempted to dismember them with palm branches. They were children.
At 11, he and less than 50 other children were freed by the Vietnamese troops.
They were all that was left.
They made their way to a nearby village, where almost a hundred people managed to congregate. They were the only survivors of the 3 labor camps in the vicinity. At one point, too weak to walk, he sat down by the road. A few minutes later he was approached by a woman who asked his name. When he told her, tears started streaming down her face and she told him that she was his older sister. She had been married and had three children of her own when their village was taken. She and her children had been put in one camp, her husband in another. She was punished for any "misdemeanor" by being forced to watch her starving children be murdered. Her husband was never seen or heard from again.
The hundred of them tried to make their way to the Thailand border, where they knew there were refugee camps, but to get there they had to cross miles of mine fields. They would walk or crawl in straight lines, and if someone detonated a mine the rest of them would walk over the bodies because they knew the ground there was safe, often with the victims still alive and begging for help, but no one was strong enough to drag their mutilated bodies with them. They were forced to leave them behind, one at a time, until they reached the camp.
Less than 25 of them arrived alive.
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We hear facts about things like the Srebrenica Massacre in 1995, where 8,000 men were murdered in cold blood and 25-30,000 were "ethnically cleansed." As massive as it sounds, it doesn't sink in, but it horrifies us. About Rowanda, and the Iraqi mass graves where hundreds of thousands of bodies, covered with marks of torture and violent death are piled, nameless and faceless. We hear them and they are just numbers. Numbers that disgust, that anger, that make some weep... but we keep them from having faces. We keep from feeling responsibility. We hide behind the number, feeling like the watering of our eyes is enough to pay our debt to those who perished.
The missionary on Sunday brought the genocide to a personal level. A level where he forced your mind to see the faces of his friends and family who were a part of.
But even then, it was 10 years ago. Surely not today...
But yes. Today. As it has since the fall of man, it continues. The world was so full of violence that Noah and his family were the only righteous that could be found. The Egyptians murdered hundreds of thousands of children. The Romans massacred entire cultures, and swept through their lands with instances like the slaughter of the children of Bethlehem. "Rachel is weeping for her children..."
The Aztecs were sodomizing and cutting the hearts out of thousands of natives every single day as an offering to their sun god when Cortez arrived in South America. The blood ran in rivers through Mexico city. The blood of those who had never heard the name of Jesus because none had ever gone...
In the early 1100's, there was the Massacre of the Latins in Constantinople. Estimated 60,000 men, women and children murdered in their homes.
Mid 1500's- The Cyprus Massacre- 30-50,000 dead.
1890's, 1-3 HUNDRED THOUSAND Armenians hunted down and killed like animals.
1930's- Japanese in Nanking raping and killing an estimated 260,000
1930's and 40's- over 2.5 MILLION Jews killed. Numbers can't be completed though, because they're done by population paperwork, but thousands upon thousands of unregistered infants were murdered as well.
1970's-90's- Cambodian Genocide in the labor camps. 2 Million estimated dead.
1980's-2001- over 400,000 Iraqi citizens tortured and murdered
Currently in Darfur, Sudan, villages have been being systematically destroyed for 7 years. Hundreds of thousands are being murdered. Millions are refugees.
What do we do?
I don't know. Ask yourself. Ask the Lord. What should you do?
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