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The Darfur rally. A reader's take:
It was huge.
I brought my dog - who loves being around tons of people, so in that way, it was also kind of fun.
But in a way it was a bit depressing. It was a very Jewish rally - tons of school kids from around the country. Darfur is apparently a huge issue in the reform Jewish community synagogues and day schools. [[ed. note: more on this]] ...
Anyway, the reason it was a bit depressing is that Elie Weisel and a few other speakers kept comparing what was going on today to the Holocaust - the theme of the rally being "never again" - which is fine, I agree - never again.
But now it's Monday and the rally is over and famous people like George Clooney are on flights back to L.A. - and what is going to happen? Never mind the fact that we've so screwed up in Iraq that people won't trust us to intervene even if we wanted to (which I don't think we do). Russell Simmons spoke and was the only one to speak out against some kind of intervention force. It was weird - Darfurian after Darfurian asking for some sort of NATO/Bosnia style
response, and then Russell Simmons going up there talking about Uranium deposits under the ground, and not to trust the government and that there can never, ever be any military force used to end this conflict.Meanwhile, the Darfurian rebels just said no to a peace agreement yesterday too - lots of hopeful voices at the rally for that route - the peace talks in Abuja - but not amongst the Darfurians there who don't think the Janjaweed will be stopped by any peace talks and want the West to help.
So yeah, long answer - it was emotional, interesting, but ultimately, a bit depressing. ...
And there were powerful people there - Barak Obama, Nancy Pelosi, etc....
We'll see.