PeaceBang

Panzi Hospital

October 7, 2007 on 3:09 pm | In Cultural Commentary |

I was thinking yesterday that Americans seem, in general, to be less sexually energized than I’ve ever seen us. Maybe it’s just me getting older and more accepting of my spinsterhood, but I don’t know… aside from the young hotties working their thing (and the usual relentless droning of the porn industry), our erotic mojo in the U.S. seems way down.

As well it should be.

Stories like this make me think that, if we have a sense of global solidarity at all, we should all be in mourning in a specifically sexual part of our beings.

The article says that most of the perpetrators were psychically damaged by their participation in the Rwandan genocide. I’m sure that’s true.

And how about just plain evil? How about Satan?
(I’ve studied the person of Satan for so many years and with such intensity of focus, someone once introduced me as “an amateur demonologist,” and I didn’t correct him).

There are other colonized, traumatized populations whose men don’t go around tearing out the insides of their sisters and mother’s bodies with penises and bayonets. What is happening? What is happening? In a world with so much sexual violence against women, we haven’t seen the worst?

Someone, I forget who, said to me yesterday that America is no different, but the genocide is slower.

Why do people have to say these things, set up obscenely ridiculous parallels between unimaginable horror in Africa and our problems here at home?

Look, I can’t process what I am reading about the Democratic Republic of Congo any better than any other American. But please God, can we bear witness without engaging in competitive oppression?

That’s a rhetorical question.

I apologize for not opening this for comments. My heart just isn’t in it.