Pbenjay's Blog

Not sure how this blog is going to play out… For weeks and weeks I’ve struggled with how I wanted to write about two highly emotionally charged present day issues.  And you thought this blog was just going to be funny, right?

The first issue is a cause I have embraced for the last few years – Darfur and the daily genocide in the Sudan.  I know why I have hesitated.  This is a SERIOUS subject; fraught with religious and racial overtones, personal financial sacrifice versus business as usual, jingoism, non-interventionism, isolationism and nationalism.

They’re killing people over there! EVERY DAY! The Sudanese government is systematically eliminating an entire race of African tribes.  The trouble began in 2003 when two different armed groups, the SLA (Sudan Liberation Alliance) and JEM (Justice and Equality Movement) attacked the Sudanese government because the government was failing to protect the people from nomadic groups and economic marginalization. That was 2003 and now it’s 2010 and they’re still at it.

It all started for me innocently enough at the Tribeca Film Festival a couple of years ago.  I went to see The Devil Came on Horseback. The movie was extraordinarily powerful to say the least and afterward there was a Q & A with  Brian Steidle, whose first hand account of the genocide is the basis for the book and subsequent eponymous movie.  This is a story with many chapters, I have much more to say…but not today.

The Devil Came on Horseback

Closer to home, we are in the midst of an enormous ecological crisis -the BP oil well disaster!  Again, I haven’t written about it, my God, I can hardly watch it on television.  As an MSNBC groupie, I have been listening to daily reports about this egregious and irresponsible catastrophe.   I am sick to my stomach at the site of blackened oil slicked pelicans, dead carcasses washed up on the shore, globs and blogs of black oil rolling up on the beach and the horrific satellite views of the ever-widening poisonous spill.  Even with all of the evidence, I find it INCONCEIVABLE to wrap my head around the figure of 5000 barrels of oil leaking into the ocean every day.  AND THEY CAN’T SEEM TO STOP IT!!  As long as this horror story continues, I’ll bring it up in my blog.   I asked Peter the other day, “What do you think we would be doing if the oil was sloshing up on the beaches of the Jersey Shore or the Hamptons”?? In fact, here is a link to click on and you will see just how big this disaster is.  It will transpose the breadth and width of the oil spill to your state and you can see the enormity of it all. Click on the link in the blog above  this one.

BP Oil Disaster

Think about it!!!!

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