Are All Humans Human?

I know this blog post looks really long and boring...and that a lot of you will choose to scroll over it...but I challenge you to sacrifice some time in order to learn about something that applies not only to our Gender Studies class, but also to humanitarian issues throughout the world... ( I even added pictures to keep you interested...in case you think it's boring... :) ...)

On Friday night, I went with some girls on my floor to the Visions and Voices event featuring Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire...I went into this night not really expecting much and anticipated being bored...I WAS SO WRONG! Although Dallaire topic of discussion was about the use of children as weapons in civil wars, the main point of his presentation applies to so many other things in life. He began by asking the question: Are all humans human? And if so...are we acting accordingly? When he first asked this question, about a million thoughts began to flood my mind...but something I started thinking alot about was our gender studies class.

Dallaire asked this convicting question in the context of his story about his commanding of United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda between 1993 and 1994, and for trying to stop the genocide that was being waged by extremists in the country. He spoke about how, when faced with the decision about whether or not to pull out of the country, world powers decided to prioritize human lives beneath the lack of gain of any positive resource or power. Dallaire continued with this heart-breaking story that I found written online and have copied below:

"The question is are all humans human or are some more human than
others? Do some count more than others? One of the instruments that
the extremists would use during the genocide to gain more food and water and medical supplies, would be to use very young children; five, six and such ages, put them in the middle of the road and keep them there in order to stop the convoys with those resources coming through. If the children moved away they simply killed them outright with their machetes. And so on one day I was going between the lines, and up ahead there was a child of about three or four years old, and in no-man’s-land we [were] not going to abandon a child, so we slowed down
expecting an ambush, we stopped, jumped out with a couple of soldiers – there was nobody. We went around to the huts to see if someone would take care of this child, and all we found were bodies of people who had been killed five or six weeks earlier on, decomposing and half eaten by wild dogs and rats, and as we looked around we lost the child. So we went back and found him in a hut where there were two adults male, female, and some children in advanced states of
decomposition. He was sitting there as if it was home. I took the child and I brought him into the middle of the road and I looked at him, and this young three or four year old boy with a bloated stomach and scars and dirt in rags, flies all around him, but then I looked into his eyes, and what I saw in the eyes of that child was exactly what I saw in the eyes of my young son before I left Canada. They were the eyes of a human child and they were exactly the same. We have a responsibility to protect, we do not have the right to assess and to establish a priority within humanity, for all humans are human and not one of us is more human than the other."
(http://www.hmd.org.uk/assets/downloads/General_Romeo_Dallaire.pdf)

For me, this story, and Dallaire's message was a wake up call; a wake up call to the ignorance and screwed up priorities of our world. I thought that his message applied to the conflicts we are studying in our class as struggle, conflict, discrimination, hate crimes, bullying, and ignorance can all be seen in the context of the gender studies we are discussing. Even looking below at the post Diego made with the pictures and stories of hate crimes again homosexual individuals (http://genderconflict1.blogspot.com/2011/11/three-men-stab-burn-gay-man-burke.html) ...I look back on the comment that I made before I went to this presentation on Friday night :

Reading this post...I felt two emotions: anger and sadness. I was angry because
of all the hate in our world that has lead humans to attack other humans in
violence. And I was sad because my heart goes out to these people who must feel
so alone in the world. How can someone ever think that actions like this are
justified??? Just like in everything and all controversial topics, people are
always going to have different opinions and views about the LGBTQ community that stem from a variety of things including background, religion, personal
experience, upbringing, culture, moral/ethical views, and individualistic
expressions...but what boggles my mind is that people feel as though they are
entitled to act in violence and hatred toward another human being.

Attending this presentation, hearing this message, and being convicted to share it made me realize how necessary it is for our generation to see the hatred and ignorance present in our world. We have to do something about it, and I think it begins with realizing the messed up priorities of our generation. Throughout the presentation, Dallaire kept showing pictures of children in underprivileged countries and even commented on how during the horrors in Rwanda in 1944, the media was more interested in the trial of OJ Simpson..this only made me think about how even today, America is more interested in the failed 72 day marriage of Kim Kardashian that's posted all over the news, internet, and main stream media rather than being informed about the realities of war that are terrorizing the world.

I'm not quite sure how to end this post...so I'll close with a repetition of Dallaire's insightful words:

"We have a responsibility to protect, we do not have the right to assess and to establish a priority within humanity, for all humans are human and not one of us
is more human than the other."