Do you tell the most gruesome stories you can find? Do you tell them about raping women in front of their dying husbands and sons? Throwing children into the air and shooting them as they fall into fires? Do you tell about the torture that happens as young and old men are slowly put to death? About the people waiting on the edge of town listening to gunshots in the distance and wondering who is dead and what is coming? Do you tell about women who choose to get raped as they cultivate food for their families because by doing so, they are saving their husband’s and son’s lives?
Do you tell these things when you describe a genocide? About the 1 in 400,000? About the 1 in 2.5 million? Or do you speak broadly, and explain the vastness of a “refugee camp” which is a nice way of saying a “concentration camp?” Do you talk about bombs that drop from the sky and displace and kill villages of 500? About dirty water from dead bodies that makes villages sick and unlivable? About orphans and starving children? Do you tell of the masses fleeing through a country that’s supposed to be home but has turned into a bloody enemy? Or do you remind them of the suffering of the individual at the hands of that same foe?
In one way, you show the scope, the breadth of the disaster and the many people they could help. In the other, they feel immense empathy for that one woman, that one child, that one father.
What we can’t do is do both. We cannot show the experience of each of 400,000. We cannot explain the uncertain, unhealthy routine of 2.5 million. We must choose one or the other. Otherwise, it is overwhelming and impossible to understand. It is like saying to people that millions of Jews died in the Nazi death camps. They don’t know what that means. They have no idea what that means.
But what are we losing by choosing one or the other? What are we losing when we can’t understand every individual experience?
How do you quantify a genocide?
posted by iliza @ 9:36 PM
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