Heartbreaking 'Hotel Rwanda' haunts us with guilt

Maggie says:
Last night I finally got around to seeing 'Hotel Rwanda' and this next afternoon, can't seem to get it out of my head. Too often I tend to not exactly avoid - but not exactly rush into, either - movies that I know up front are going to be tough to watch and process. This was one of them, but I'm really glad I went. And you should, too.

As an overly-political high school newspaper reporter, I once wrote a column imploring students studying the Holocaust not to say that the world would never let genocide happen again. My point was that we were letting it happen, that it was happening at that moment in Rwanda, but no one was paying attention or worse, didn't care. (This morning I dug through boxes of old stuff looking for that column. I wanted to read what my naive seventeen-year-old self had to say about a place I couldn't imagine and events beyond my comprehension. But it's gone forever, I guess.)

What's most powerful about "Hotel Rwanda" is the gap between how the Rwandan people expected the world to come to their rescue and how little we cared about their plight at all. The most powerful line in the movie comes not from a Rwandan (Don Cheadle is fantastic, by the way) but from an American photographer played by Joaquin Phoenix who, when being evacuated with the rest of the white tourists/aidworkers/newspeople, won't let a Rwandan hotel employee hold an umbrella over his head on the way to the bus that will take him to safety. "Don't do that," he says, pushing the man away. "I feel so fucking ashamed."

Without question, this is a movie that should shame us. We deserve to be shamed. Every day, we ignore at our convenience global tragedies an ocean away and neighborhood tragedies just down the street. The weight of events that should crush us with their heaviness and our own sense of responsibility is too easy to shrug off. And then there's the guilt factor. Sometimes it seems incomprehensible to enjoy simple routines like a good cup of coffee with breakfast when there is literally madness going on everywhere around us that no one is doing anything about. And I note the irony that choosing to see "Hotel Rwanda" over something else isn't exactly a moral victory - it is, after all, only a movie. Ten years after the world stood by and did nothing for Rwanda, guilt-ridden progressives are seeing the cinematic portrayal of this genocide and thinking how terrible, how appropriate that they saw "Hotel Rwanda" instead of "Hitch." And that's pretty sad, too.

I suppose this is where progressives in America are today. We call ourselves aware but really, we don't know anything. We call ourselves activists but it's hard to look at what we actually do versus all that we don't. And in America, we have everything within our reach but can barely see outside the bias of our own privilege.

As a friend suggested recently - "maybe ignorance really is bliss." When I'm depressed about everything that's terrible, I picture those who really don't care about events outside of their small world. The smug expressions carried around by way too many Americans usually infuriate me, but think about it: their internal dialogue must be so much simpler and happier than ours. Through their blindness to everything but themselves, they don't even realize what there is to be upset about.

Since I'm reminiscing, here's a link courtesy of my brilliantly smart and funny old friend Saleem: check out The Ten Most Underreported Humanitarian Stories of 2004 for more guilt-ridden progressive internal conflict.