Genocide

The Mission Team that I'm a part of watched The Killing Fields this afternoon. Remarkably powerful and thought provoking. There was one scene that caught me particularly off-guard though, especially mine and others' response. It was the scene when Dith Pran is just escaping from the Khmer, and he's walking through a bog. He stumbles and falls, finding himself surrounded by hundreds of skeletal corpses. 

My first reaction was, nothing, at all. Another member said, "gross." My reaction quickly turned to sickness, both at what I was seeing and at our responses. More than hundreds, if not thousands, of corpses those were people. People who had families and lives and really aren't all the different from you or me. 

And I barely gave it a second thought. 

Are we so desensitized by the media that we no longer feel when faced with atrocities? Are we so used to the horrible things that go on in the world that we no longer react?

I got to wondering how many people were killed in the Cambodia genocide. Estimates range from 1,700,000 to 2,300,000 men, women and children. 

Right now there is another genocide going on, in Darfur. The local government claims 9,000 people have been killed, the UN claims 200,000 people. Other human rights organizations have pegged the number at closer to 400,000.

Violent deaths in the Iraq War have been estimated at between 600,000 and 1,100,000 people.

It saddens and sickens me...