"Events of massive public suffering defy quantitative analysis. How can one really understand statistics citing the death of 6 million Jews or graphs of third world starvation? Do numbers really reveal the agony, the interruption, the questions that these victims put to the meaning and nature of our individual lives and life as a whole?"
Today I learned that on September 11 in Chile in 1973 there was a coup, financed by the U.S. that overthrew the socialist democratically elected president and killed 30,000 people that year. But 30,000 is still just a number to me. Sometimes suffering is so big and so catastrophic that it numbs me because it is so incomprehensible. Pinochet's ruling regime cut up an artist into four parts, shipped each part off to a different part of Chile to teach them a lesson, the U.S. knew about this and didn't say a word. President Nixon called Pinochet's take over of Chile a triumph for democracy.
I'm taking a Latin American Studies course and each week I come home liking America less and feeling like there are more conflicts in the world I, and most others, have no idea about than ones we actually know about. So much suffering, so many wars, so much heartache and poverty and violence, it's hard to process even a small piece of it.
Today at school we were talking about why it wasn't a good idea to play pretend guns. We talked about how guns aren't good because they kill people and when you take someone's life from the you can never give it back. My first graders understand this but I'm not sure I really do. One of the questions I had to answer today was, "How does what we do contribute to the suffering of the people living in desperate conditions and what can we do to change this?" good question.
As we were leaving class today my teacher said, "Remember, silence and inaction are actions as well. They are still decisions."
I have a lot to think about.
