October 22, 2008
A Thank You to the Candidates
In a post after the first presidential debate, I posted a petition to get the candidate’s to speak about genocide, global poverty, and AIDS. It was very disappointing that the only presidential debate that was supposed to focus exclusively on foreign policy did not bring up these issues one time.
But then things changed. In the Vice Presidential debate, both Joe Biden and Sarah Palin gave encouraging answers on Darfur. In the next presidential debate, both Barack Obama and John McCain did as well. While words do not mean as much actions, the fact is, whoever is the next President of the United States has promised the American people that they are going to do more practical work on ending the genocide in Darfur.
I don’t think the kind of attention the people of Darfur have had by being mentioned at debates like this would have happened were it not for the activist’s in this world that are drawing attention to this issue. The next president, whoever he is, knows that there is a strong base of support, especially amongst young people, for him to take extra steps for peace in Darfur. It’s not going to be easy but these are encouraging signs and it’s times like these when we in the Dumbledore’s Amry for the real world should feel good and remember how important our voices are and how lucky we are to be so valuable to the growing anti-genocide movement. Thank you to all of you for all of your support in waking the world up the way the DA woke the world up to Voldemort’s return!
But in Darfur, the fight is far from over. As Darfur activist Susan Morgan says, whoever the next president is, he will need us to pressure him to turn his words into actions.
One Trackback
Warning: call_user_func(custom_pings) [function.call-user-func]: First argument is expected to be a valid callback in /home/hpallian/public_html/wp-includes/comment-template.php on line 1334